


to treat everything as if it were a nail

by thingswithteeth



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Espionage, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Friendship, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Spies & Secret Agents, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 10:21:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 102,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9230663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: Jyn Erso is raised as a hostage of the Empire. It matters less than it should. There are many different ways to rebel.





	1. Chapter 1

            The sand was black on Lah'mu, and the skies were gray. The moisture vaporators and the droids used for agricultural work continued to whir through their daily motions as if nothing much had changed, and he supposed that very little really had.

            Lyra Erso lay where she had fallen. No one had seen to her body, and two days left out in the cold had left her clothing and her hair as wet as everything else on Lah'mu, as if she had drowned rather than burned with the sudden burst of a blaster rifle.

            He'd see to her before he went; there would be time enough for that after he had seen to the living, if there was anything here left living to be seen to. He hadn't known Lyra well, but he thought she'd probably prefer that. She'd always seemed practical, in the way that any woman whose husband was a target on his family's back would have to be in order to survive.

            The moment that he saw the open hatch on the hidden place that he had helped to build, he knew what he would find. He went to look anyway. The years and two rebellions had built a hard shell of metal and pragmatism around his bones, but he had always been a dreamer at heart.

            The hole was deep, and it was dark. He was almost – almost – glad not to see the Erso girl crouched there, staring up at him from the thick blackness at the bottom. Alone in the dark was no place for a child.

            He didn't linger. No helping her now, and no rescue to ride to this time. The Erso girl was gone, or dead, and he had suffered enough losses not to linger over this one. This wasn't the first, or the worst; it wouldn't be the last.

            Saw Gerrera returned to the farm, gathered his men from their fruitless search of the house (as if Galen Erso or his daughter would be found tucked away in some corner, perhaps hiding under thin sheets on beds or in with chipped plates in cupboards), and did what he could for the dead. He left.

            In the years that would follow, he wouldn't linger overlong on the memory of the Ersos; they would wander across his mind less frequently than some and perhaps a little more frequently than others, given the rumors that trickled to his ears about Galen Erso's resumed work for the Empire, for all that the form and function of that work remained amorphous even insofar as rumors went.

            He didn't forget the girl, though (for all that he barely remembered her at all, big green eyes and chubby toddler legs and an alarming tendency to grab at his blaster during the long journey to Lah'mu that had left him wondering if there was a way to slap at her fingers without Lyra Erso suddenly and spontaneously developing Force powers that allowed her to kill him with motherly ire alone). He didn't forget her, and when the subject of her father arose, he would always think, briefly and perhaps a little wistfully (he had always been a dreamer at heart), that it would have been nice to save her.

 

            Jyn's papa's fingers were cold, white-knuckled where he bent them around her own, much smaller hand. She thought that the grip was meant to be comforting, but his jaw was tight and his gaze set straight ahead, and she was not comforted.

            The shuttle was too-bright and cold, nothing like the soft gray light outside the farm or the muted gold within, so she curled closer into his side anyway, clung to his big fingers until they stole some of the warmth from hers.

            "What a sweet child you've raised, Galen," said the man in white, and it was too bright and too jovial a way to speak to the bereaved, even if he hadn't been the one to cause the bereavement, so disconnected from the moment that it took Jyn a moment to realize that he was talking about her. "So calm and well-behaved."

            Perhaps that was the moment when she decided to be anything but.

            It was not a conscious decision, and _in_ the moment she mostly felt cold and small and scared. Beneath more physical discomforts, there was a yawning hole somewhere low in her chest that would swallow her if she thought for too long about why her mama was not there, bracketing her in and providing all of the warmth and protection and courage that she couldn't quite reach on her own.

             When the shuttle landed on Eadu and the troopers pulled her away from her papa, responding to the order implicit in the hand that the man in white waved, she squirmed and struggled , scraped dull nails futilely against sleek armor and kicked one of them in the helmet hard enough to make him recoil, even if it did no good. She screamed like a thing possessed, threw the sort of tantrum that her mama never would have tolerated.

            Only after she was safely ensconced in the room that was to be hers, its windowless duracrete walls covered in filmy white drapes and its single narrow bed swaddled in pale blue the color of the sky between rains  – _"You'll all live in comfort,"_ the man she would learn was named Orson Krennic had told Lyra, and it had been a lie but it hadn't been intended as one – did she stop to wonder if her father had screamed too, or if that had just been her own voice ricocheting off the close walls of the shuttle, filling the silence where his protests should have been.

 

            The man in white visited Jyn three times during her first year on Eadu.

            The first time he swept around the room, running gloved hands over every surface in a way that made her feel itchy and angry beneath her skin even though she remained reluctant to claim the space as her own. He smiled too much and asked her how she was settling in, as if he expected her to like him, as though a fistful of days were enough for her to have forgotten the way her mother's arms fit around her.

            He took off one of his gloves and crouched to offer his hand to her, the smile still sitting strange on his thin lips. "My name is Orson Krennic," he said, "and I hope that you and I will become friends."

            Jyn considered his outstretched hand for a long moment before reaching out her own. Then she dug her nails into his hand hard enough to make him bleed, childish fingers scrambling against his skin even as he jerked back.

            The way he muttered the words her mother had tried to pretend she hadn't accidentally taught Jyn as he strode out of the room and the red on his bare hand felt like a victory.

            The way that he tossed, "Galen will be so disappointed that you're not ready to see him yet," over his shoulder felt like less of one.

 

            In the broad scheme of things, Lyra Erso had not had very long to teach her daughter anything.

            When the simplified math problems that Galen Erso provided for his daughter (always about things like crop yield and water usage, never touching on the things that he pondered late into the night and which they all politely pretended had been left behind on Coruscant) began to outstrip her ability to understand them, Jyn had not worried that he would love her less for not having inherited his unrivaled genius; in the manner of a child who had never been anything other than well-loved, the possibility had never occurred to her. She had worried about disappointing him, though.

            Lyra had pressed a kiss to her cheek and said, "Better to be clever than to be a genius, in any case," with the kind of sly glance at her husband that marked the comment as a joke for him as much as an attempt to comfort their daughter.

            She had gone with her mother when Lyra visited neighboring farms, to trade for replacement parts for the droids or seeds or utensils, things that they needed but wouldn't dare trade for directly when the rare cargo shipments came from off world, because even the smallest chance of Galen or Lyra being recognized was too big a chance to take. Lyra had bartered with and wheedled the woman from whom they bought their few precious luxury goods, datacrons for Galen and the occasional toy for Jyn, until they were both red-cheeked and breathless and smiling, but had listened silently when the pinched-faced man who hoarded mechanical parts told her his prices, countered only once, and then doled out the credits regardless of how much he had marked up the price and whether he had agreed to her counter-offer or not.

            Jyn had asked about it once. Her mother had shrugged and said, "If you want something from someone, push them as hard as you can – but know when to stop pushing, at least if what you want from them isn't something you can afford to walk away from."

            Lyra Erso had taught her daughter some things: that it was better to be clever and adaptable than it was to be almost anything else, that she had to know what she was willing to walk away from, and that she had to be willing to sacrifice for the things that she wasn't.

            The finer points of those lessons did not really matter or make sense to Jyn until she was older, but she did not need the finer points to understand that she needed to be clever, because her papa was not something she could stand to walk away from, and would not have been even if he hadn't been all she had left.

            The next time that Orson Krennic came to see her, she stared at him from her spot on the bed, surrounded by the datatapes and toys that had been sent in some strange, misguided effort to placate her _("You will all live in comfort."_ ) and which she had largely ignored until boredom and a child's curiosity had undermined her resolve. She pretended that she was looking at the pinched-faced man back on Lah'mu, who was greedy and mean but who had not murdered her mother, and managed to sound very nearly polite when she said, "I want to see my papa."

            Krennic tilted his head. He was not smiling this time; the curl of his lips said that he might want to sneer, and the expression looked more natural than smiles had. "Are you ready to behave?" he asked.

            Jyn was not ready to behave. She was ready to rebel, throw fits, throw _things_ at his stupid, stupid face.

            She was ready to see her papa, though. "Yes," she mumbled.

            Later, much later, Jyn would realize that Krennic had not been either convinced or swayed by any action of hers; he would have let her see Galen regardless, because Galen Erso and his genius were also things that Krennic was unwilling to walk away from, and Galen could only be assuaged by knowledge of Jyn's continued well-being offered by an untrustworthy source for so long. In the moment, when Krennic said, "Very well, then, why don't you change into a fresh frock and I'll take you to see him?" if felt nearly as much like a victory as his blood beneath her nails had.

            She had ignored most of the offerings of clothing deposited in her room by silent droids or by the troopers, who tended to ignore her whenever they were forced to enter her room, as though she were the ghost of some particularly small and angry Jedi Master. There was rather a lot of clothing. Someone had apparently told Krennic that this was a thing that would matter to the daughter of a genius farmer; she had once admired the Nerf hide boots the teenage son of a neighbor had taken particular pride in, but other than that they had been wrong. Perhaps she would have cared more, had she grown up on Coruscant instead of Lah'mu.

            Right now, she cared only because Krennic cared, and it seemed too little a thing to risk him changing his mind about taking her to her papa. She grabbed the clothing that seemed least wrinkled from a prolonged stay on the floor and stepped into the refresher to change when Krennic showed no intention of stepping out to accommodate her.

            It was the first time she had been out of her room since arriving on Eadu. The lights in the hall were brighter, and the bare walls starker, and she almost liked them better than her room for that. The nice room was as much of a lie as Krennic's smiles; the ugliness of duracrete walls and unforgiving lighting seemed more honest.

            They went down one corridor and then the next, a twisting maze that Jyn didn't have much time to contemplate, since Krennic didn't seem inclined to shorten his pace for her the way her father did when they walked together. It was briefly tempting to grab the edge of his flapping cloak, less to slow him down and more to annoy, but before Jyn could give the idea more than a passing thought they reached a door.

            The room they entered was clearly intended for work, not for living in, and her papa was the only other occupant, although given the number of datapads and the amount of flimsiplast spread across the tables, he probably wasn't the only one who worked here. She had a moment to take in Galen Erso – hair too short, face too bare and too clean, clothing too crisp, dark circles beneath the eyes too dark, _wrong_ – before he was crossing the short distance between them and folding her into his arms. That, at least, was right and familiar, if a touch more desperate than his hugs had ever been, saving that last one on Lah'mu when he had thought that their parting would last longer than it ultimately had.

            "Stardust," he murmured into her hair, "my Stardust."

            He was shaking, Jyn realized, just a little, enough for her to feel it where she was crushed against his chest but probably not enough for Krennic to see. "Papa," she said, unnerved, "I can't breathe." It wasn't what she had meant to say, and when his arms loosened reflexively she burrowed closer, because that also wasn't what she had meant to make happen.

            "Touching," Krennic said, and Jyn had not been capable of forgetting that he was there, but she had perhaps for a moment come close, because the interruption was, if not quite startling, then more jarring than it ought to have been. "Try to keep the reunion brief, Galen. I still have use for you, and I expect results."

            There was something in his voice, some sly insinuation that Jyn couldn't quite pin down. Her papa's arms tightened around her again, and this time, Jyn did not complain.

 

            It was not the last time that Jyn visited her father, although after that she was always accompanied by a Stormtrooper, not by Krennic himself. Her papa was always happy to see her, but he always seemed distracted, too, and the inky smudges beneath his eyes were more pronounced with each visit.

            The visits became fewer and further between.

            "He barely asks about you at all anymore," Krennic said during his third visit, near the end of Jyn's first year on Eadu. His cruelty was casual, more a reflex than anything done with intentionality; Jyn did not matter to him enough as anything other than a pawn for him to set out deliberately to hurt her, but he was also not a man who could see a weapon in his hand and not give into the desire to use it.

            Krennic tapped something into the computer set into the wall, the one that Jyn couldn't access other than to play the datatapes they gave her, and the door slid open. It slid closed again a moment later, and then open when he stepped closer to it to demonstrate. "I'm tired of diverting staff to make sure that you feed yourself and use the refresher. You're a big girl. Surely you can manage it yourself." He wagged a finger at her, the kind of friendly, playful gesture that was always so at odds with her desire to claw his eyes out and his own clear disdain for her. "You can see your papa, but I don't want you to distract him. He's doing important work for the Empire."

            He left before she could find the words to reply.

 

            The first time she got hungry enough to creep into the mess hall, she nearly walked right back out. Inside was a confusing mix of lab uniforms and civilian clothes and military armor, most of the noise coming from a group of science officers arguing heatedly at a corner table (her father was not among them) but the rest of the room underscoring their debate with a dull roar of speech and motion.

            One of the off-duty troopers, recently enough from his shift that he'd only had time to remove his helmet and reveal the close-cropped hair beneath and the smattering of freckles over the dark skin of his nose, took pity when he saw her struggling with her tray and reached out to take it from her. "Come on. You can sit with me." He wasn't much friendlier than that, but after a year spent more-or-less starved for contact, not much friendly was friendly enough for her to trail willingly after him.

            The men who had fired on her mother had been dressed in the same armor. For all she knew, he was one of them – she had never seen any of them without their helmets – but she didn't know what to do with that possibility, so she left if behind.

            "Most of us are glad to get a break from nutrition bars and protein shakes," her companion noted, once they had both eaten enough to take the edge off their hunger. "Here we have—eh, looks like veg-meat in... some kind of sauce?" He sounded only moderately sure that this was an improvement; the shiny white armor over his shoulders moved awkwardly when he shrugged. There was a slick drop of gravy on the front of it, which Jyn found satisfying for reasons she couldn't quite name. "The caf here is better than what they serve on the ships, at least, and that's all I really care about." He smiled at her like he had made a joke. She didn't really get it, but she smiled back, and that seemed to be the correct response, because he kept up the idle string of conversation until she finished her food, long after his own had disappeared.

            She saw him again at dinner, but not after that. She learned that, with the exception of the Death Troopers pulled from Krennic's personal guard and whatever officer had ended up in charge of the garrison which guarded the laboratory – so backwater regardless of how important the work going on there was that being given charge of it was generally considered either a mark of disfavor or a sign that the officer was new enough to need seasoning – the troopers stationed there were cycled out at regular intervals. Being posted on Eadu was something of a reward for them, light duty and comparatively decent food after long stints in space or the heavy concussion of grenades on worlds not yet quite tamed by the Empire.

            It was the first thing that she learned about the Eadu that existed outside of the four walls of her room; it would not be the last. She learned what to eat in the mess and what to avoid, that the grim-faced man who doled it all out could be counted on to give her an extra portion, for all that he didn't speak more than two words to her at a time. She learned the maze of hallways, until she could navigate them blindfolded and, once security had loosed up enough for her to step outside, she learned that the skies never stopped pouring rain. That didn't bother her, child of a moisture-rich world that she was (Lah'mu, always Lah'mu; Coruscant was nothing but a distant dream by the time she was seven or eight, and sometimes a nightmare, because that had been the first place she had laid eyes on the monster that would rip her family apart). She learned that the engineer with the mousy brown hair would deny her entrance into the lab because she felt that Jyn was a distraction from the Work, but that the one with the broad, shiny bald patch on his head had daughters of his own back home, six of them, and would leave the door open behind him and slip her pieces of candy from the pockets of his jumpsuit when he thought that no one else was looking. She learned to judge which of the troopers assigned to the laboratory would ignore her, and which would resent her, and which would try to turn her into a pet, and how each of those might be useful in turn.

            After that first meal, she never again forgot herself long enough to like any of them; this, too, was a lesson learned from Eadu.

            It was easy not to like the troopers; all of them were gone in the time it took for the rainy season to become the rainier season, or for that to turn into the season in which occasionally two days in a row it didn't rain. Some days, it was harder to remember to hate the other faces that the Empire wore, the ones not hidden behind polished helmets of black or white.

 

            She still visited her papa regularly, but sometimes, late at night and hidden away in her room, she wondered why she bothered. More and more, he was absorbed in his work. Even if her early memories from Coruscant were hazy ones, she remembered that he had been like this then: always loving, but always twisted up in some complex problem, so that sometimes if she spoke and drew him out of the workings of his mind he looked at her for a second, maybe two, as if she was wearing the face of a stranger, before the familiar warmth and affection returned.

            Once, he said, voice as absently gentle as the hand that he stroked over her hair, eyes distant and mind deep in whatever equation was on the datapad in front of him, "Sometimes, I'm glad you're here. I would have missed you, Stardust."

            Later that night, she would wonder if to be missed would have been better somehow; if a missing thing had more value than one constantly within reach.

            Once, he put down whatever he had been working on and pulled her into his lap, arms closing around her bony shoulders. She did not fit as well as she once had, but she tucked her head under his chin anyway.

            "Remember," he said, "whatever I do, I do it to protect you."

            The words were familiar; he'd said them once before. She hadn't understood them then, but she had said that she did. She didn't say it this time; he had spoken softly, and she could pretend not to have heard.

 

            There were small things, true things, which remained true no manner how much else changed, no matter how kind or how cruel the world or how capricious the roll of the dice. Here were two about Jyn Erso:

            One: She had no home. No matter how close or how far, Galen Erso was at best a memory and at worst a ghost. He was the distant sun around which she perambulated, or perhaps she was the star, never quite pulling him into her orbit; he was not something which she could carry on her back, crawl inside and rest and be still. He was constant living proof that sometimes, to love a thing was not enough; and,

            Two: She took her friends where she could find them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What am I doing? I don't know. Where am I going? I don't know. How will I get there? _I don't know._
> 
> Less fix-it fic than fix-ish fic, because I don't think the end of the movie needed to change so much as they needed to offer me a hug and some chocolate on my way out of the theater.


	2. Chapter 2

            The first person that Jyn might have considered calling a friend, were it not for the Imperial insignia sewn neatly to the front of his flight jacket, was Tag. He would have seemed massive to an adult. To Jyn, he was the ongoing risk of a tension headache later in the day from craning her neck at such an unnatural angle. His hair was vibrantly, violently red. His skin was red, too, a constant sunburn he had to have picked up in the desert-dry air of some other world, far from the constantly gray skies of Eadu, and which he must have found the time to refresh every time he traveled away from the planet's landing pad, off on another cargo run for food, or supplies for the lab's tiny medcenter, or to fill whatever requisitions the engineers and the science officers had made most recently.

            They became friends in large part because Tag seemed to expect them to be friends. Not the way that Krennic had, like she would like him because he wanted her to and because he was not in the habit of being denied; no, Tag had the air of a man who had simply never been disliked by another living creature, and was therefore unfamiliar with the basic concept of someone _not_ wanting to call him friend.

            "Hey, kid," he said, when he came down the ramp to his shuttle and found her sitting on one of the crates already being offloaded by the laboratory's droids. "What're you doing out here?"

            "Sitting," Jyn said, and idly kicked her heels against the crate, because time had done nothing about her desire to throw fits and throw _things_ except teach her that, other than Krennic, on the rare occasions when he graced them with his presence, no one here had any real power to retaliate against her.

            "Huh," he said, and nodded, as if this was a perfectly good reason for a twelve-year-old to be in the middle of a downpour that was even now pasting his ruddy hair to his ruddy cheeks and doing its best to ruin a perfectly good leather flight jacket. "All right. What are you doing _here_?" He made a small gesture, hand pulled in tight near his chest, like he was used to being so big that he had to accommodate others by not making the kind of gesticulations that might reasonably take off a bystander's head. She figured he meant Eadu, or perhaps specifically the lab, since there were no other settlements on the planet.

            "I'm a hostage for my father's good behavior," she said promptly, just to see how he would react.

            "Huh," he said again, but he seemed to look at her more closely then, squinting his eyes against the water dripping down his forehead.

            "I mean," Jyn said, flatly and without conviction, "we are working for the benefit of the Empire, and we are very, very happy here." She paused. "So happy."

            He snorted, and leaned closer, which meant bending nearly in half. "Kid, they do not pay me enough to care about your sass," he said, but he said it like he was holding part of a laugh beneath his tongue, and when he leaned back there was a smile on his mouth. "Glory to the Empire, for it keeps me in Corellian rum and Dressellian beer," he added casually. He scratched the back of his neck, eyes going squinty again. "If you're important, I probably shouldn't let you sit out in the cold, though." He motioned toward the lowered ramp of his shuttle. "Come on. Anyone ever teach you to play sabacc?"

            Jyn hesitated, and he shrugged out of his jacket, dropped it carelessly across her shoulders. It was too long, hitting her at nearly the knee, and heavy enough to make her sway at the unexpected weight, but she was suddenly a great deal warmer. "Come on," he said, more gently. "Every hostage needs a seedy hobby or two. It'll be good for you."

            She followed him onto the shuttle.

 

            Half an hour later, Jyn said, "This game was clearly designed by someone who drank too much and didn't love himself enough," with perfect seriousness and a great deal of conviction, and Tag laughed so hard that he spat Dressellian beer all over his shipping manifest was forced to forfeit his hand (and later, to explain why the manifest was sticky to an entirely unamused trooper).

            It wasn't friendship. It couldn't be. But the next time that she heard that he was scheduled for a delivery, she was there on the platform waiting.

 

            "I can't believe that they left you alone with Murker," Lieutenant Yung complained to Jyn the next time that Jyn was not fast enough to exit a room when Yung entered it. Jyn was certain that Yung had a given name, but it might as well have been "Lieutenant," because she had never heard anyone utilize it. This might have been because Lieutenant Yung gave the distinct impression that familiarity would be met with a swift kick somewhere uncomfortable. The previous officer assigned to the laboratory had been the sort so new that it had seemed like his uniform wouldn't allow him to bend at the waist, there to get seasoning before being sent on to some other, more lively post. Jyn was fairly certain he hadn't yet needed to shave. It was _possible_ that Yung was in the same circumstances – she was certainly young enough, probably not more than a decade Jyn's senior – but Jyn was of the opinion that Yung was the other kind of Imperial officer who tended to get assigned to Eadu, the kind who had annoyed someone who outranked her enough to be banished to a science station where they would ne'er have to gaze on her face again, but who was still too useful to the Empire to be drummed out completely.

            There was just something disreputable about the way she wore her uniform. Jyn couldn't put her finger on _what_ that something was, since Yung kept her jacket as crisply creased, her hair as regulation short, and her spine as painfully straight as any other ranking Imperial Jyn had ever seen; her love of protocol bordered on legendary, but it was like there was some kind of implied slump to the way she stood, a mostly-intangible air of insouciance, that made her seem to be bordering sloppy in spite of her perfect posture and seemingly endless commitment to military discipline.

            She had been the first officer assigned to Eadu to show any interest in Jyn, for all that her initial interest had been parsed as, "It clearly states in my personnel file that I am allergic to children, and I should have been warned."

            They were not friends. Much to Jyn's relief, unlike Tag, Lieutenant Yung seemed as determined to remember this as Jyn was.

            "He will turn you into a delinquent," Yung added solemnly, because in spite of her dislike of children, she was also the first officer who seemed to feel that Jyn was in some way her responsibility, beyond the implicit duties of not allowing her to escape or die. Jyn had mixed feelings about that. Mostly it involved Yung critiquing her eating habits and encouraging her to run laps around the edge of the landing platform to improve healthy muscle development, but sometimes it worked in Jyn's favor. "I will have to confine you to the brig. For delinquency."

            "You'll have to catch me first," Jyn said, and decided to leave before Yung could decide that her mouthing off was a sign of impending delinquency. (It wasn't, or if it was, she had been turning into a delinquent for years without the smallest bit of help from Tag Murker.)

            Sometimes Jyn caught herself thinking that Lieutenant Yung wasn't so bad.

            She caught herself.

 

            Krennic still visited, not regularly enough for anyone at the laboratory to predict his arrival but regularly enough for them to predict that he _would_ arrive, sooner or later. It was almost funny to watch the troopers go even more rigid beneath their armor and the scientists and engineers rush to find something to look busy with. As near as Jyn could tell, no one else at the laboratory felt about the Empire the way she did. Perhaps it was the steady pay for some, like Tag, or some brand of true commitment to a cause, like Lieutenant Yung, but no one else looked at this thing called Empire and thought _I'd like to watch it burn._ Not one of them seemed to like Orson Krennic, though, which made a certain amount of sense. Krennic was not the kind of man who tried to ingratiate himself with his subordinates.

             With one exception: Krennic still seemed remarkably determined to treat her papa as though they were friends.

            "Galen," he said, as he swept into the lab, cloak fluttering behind him. "I hear you're doing good work for me on my reactor core." The silence that descended in his wake was complete, one of the engineers snapping his mouth shut in the middle of what had previously been a rather heated complaint about a project he was working on being relocated from one planet to another.

            Galen Erso did not look up from the datapad in front of him. Jyn had been sitting on the ground beside one of the engineers, counting through the deck of sabacc cards that Tag had given her during his last delivery, the edges foxed and the colors faded enough that she had to squint to see if she was looking at a saber or a stave. The engineer nudged her with his leg, encouraging her to scoot further back behind his chair.

            It was a kind gesture, and Jyn tilted her head back to smile at him. She also didn't forget that Krennic continued to hear about her father's "good work" from _someone_ , likely one or all of the other people working beside him. A smile didn't mean trust.

            "It proceeds slowly, but it proceeds." Galen said flatly. "I have very little to occupy my time besides my work."

            "Now, now," Krennic said, "no need to be insulting. You have your daughter still. Little Jyn." He sounded pleased, almost proud. Jyn was certain that he was patting himself on the back for remembering her name, as certain as she was that he _hadn't_ for the first few standard years she and her papa had spent on Eadu. "I saw to that."

            She scooted forward enough to peer out from behind the chair, but her father hadn't so much as glanced in her direction. "You did. You've also made very clear what the consequences of failure will be. Do you expect me to thank you?" He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone had gentled, turned appeasing. "The work is absorbing enough, Krennic. I would have you leave me to it."

            "Far be it from me to disturb an artist at work," Krennic said, but his pale eyes were fixed watchfully on Jyn's papa. Waiting for him to flinch. Jyn watched him, too. Her papa always flinched when he lied.

            Galen Erso didn't flinch.

            After a moment, Krennic nodded, apparently satisfied. The click of well-polished boots heralded his departure.

            "You should go," Jyn's papa said. He still wouldn't look at her, but there was no doubting for whom the words were intended.

 

            Jyn spent less time in the laboratory after that.

            She had decided, years ago, that her father was not something she was willing to walk away from. It had never occurred to her that she might not be the one to take that first step.

 

            "You should teach me how to use a blaster," Jyn said, on one of Eadu's few clear days, which also tended to be so blisteringly cold that the pale green of a cloudless sky felt like a lie.

            "I can't imagine where you got the impression that I would like to be murdered in my sleep," Lieutenant Yung said placidly, "but you were wrong."

            "I wouldn't use it against _you_ ," Jyn scoffed, and tried to pretend that Orson Krennic's pale, lined face did not flash behind her eyes when she said it.

            "You would use it against someone," Yung said, with all of the easy assurance of someone who had spent more than five minutes in conversation with Jyn.

            "I wouldn't," Jyn tried.

            "Then why do you need to learn?"

            "For protection," Jyn supplied promptly, although she knew that her chances of success, had they ever existed, were dwindling with every passing sentence.

            Yung hesitated. Barely, but Jyn noted it, and decided to press her advantage. "I know that I have all of you here to keep me safe," she said, as if a Stormtrooper or an Imperial officer had ever meant safety to her, "but what if something were to happen?" She widened her eyes imploringly, in the manner which Tag had assured her, during their last game of sabacc, was very nearly convincing. "I would be all alone. Defenseless."

            She didn't think it would work. (And she wouldn't think, not until years later, about why Lieutenant Yung, with all her strict adherence to protocol counseling against something like illicit weapons training for a civilian hostage, might pause over the thought of a young woman left defenseless, why her narrow jaw might clench and why her fingers might tap out a considering rhythm against the stiff fabric of her uniform trousers.)

            "I'm not teaching you how to use a blaster," Yung said firmly. She was silent for a few brief seconds, and Jyn could mark the moment in which she caved. "Maybe a stun baton. You probably can't kill anyone with one of those." When Jyn opened her mouth, Yung pointed a finger at her. "Jyn Erso, _that is not a challenge_."

            Jyn closed her mouth. Her victories were rare enough these days that she knew the value of even a partial one.

 

            "That's a pretty necklace," Tag said, cards in one hand and drink in the other. "I've seen something like it before."

            Jyn looked down to where her mother's necklace had slipped free of the collar of her shirt and tucked it away hastily, taking care not to flash her own cards as she did so. Tag _cheated_.

            (He had only started cheating once she had gotten good enough for him to think he might get caught.)

            "Don't suppose you'd be willing to add it to the pot?" Tag asked. They never bet credit chips – Jyn didn't have any to bet with – but Tag seemed as willing to accept the toys she had outgrown and the holodramas she had gotten bored with as he was to part with whatever little trinkets he had picked up on his most recent trip off world.

            He laughed at the look she gave him, as difficult to offend now as he had been that first day. "Didn't really think so," he said.

            (Months later, he would sneak her into the hold of his ship immediately after docking, and show her the glittering cargo there. He would not tell here where the crystals came from, or what they were for, but he would say, "See? I told you I had seen something like your pretty necklace before," his expression set somewhere between the simple joy of sharing a secret he wasn't supposed to tell and the greedy glee of a child handed something sweet.)

 

            When she was fourteen, Jyn Erso nearly got herself killed.

            She had been trying to lower herself onto the top rung of the maintenance ladder that led down from the laboratory's landing platform for years. The growth spurt that had added a few modest inches to her height finally gave her what she needed, and the brush of her foot against that wrung felt as much like a small victory as anything else in those years had.

            She miscalculated. Touching the wrung wasn't actually enough to make the drop to it, and the metal was slick, like every other outdoor surface on Eadu. She fell fifteen feet before she managed, more through luck than through skill, to hook her elbow through another rung, and she nearly jerked her arm out of its socket stopping her descent. When the troopers on the platform above stopped yelling and started towing her up by the back of her jacket, her heart was pounding too hard for her to protest being handled like a spukamas that had chewed its way into the pantry.

            They took her directly to Lieutenant Yung's office rather than just confining her to her room, which was how she knew that she was in real trouble.

            "So," Yung said, in a friendly manner which foretold of nothing good, since Yung was usually only so pleasant when she was lulling someone into a false sense of being safely within her good graces, "finally decided to make an escape attempt? I have to admit that I've been waiting for this day for years."

            "No," Jyn said to the front of her sodden shirt. Her arm still ached, and for once she wanted nothing more than to be back in the room where they had kept her confined her first year at the lab, when usually she wanted anything but. "I was just bored." It was worse because it was true. A daring attempt to make a run for it would have been better.

            She couldn't see Yung's reaction, but she heard the sigh that followed the too-long silence. "You're favoring your right arm. Go to the infirmary, get them to give you something for the pain, and get some rest. You're dismissed."

            Yung occasionally seemed to forget that Jyn was not merely a very short soldier.

            Later, drowsing in her bed after the adrenaline crash or from whatever the med droid had given her, Jyn decided that her door opening was not a good enough reason to move and feigned sleep instead.

            "See?" Yung said. "She's fine. Sleeping the sleep of the innocent, which she shouldn't be, because one of these days she is almost definitely going to be the death of me."

            "I'd have more faith in you assessment, Lieutenant, if she hadn't, by your own admittance, nearly died on your watch," said Galen Erso, and he sounded like Jyn hadn't heard him sound in what seemed like years, awake and alert and entirely focused on her.

            "Yes, sir," Yung said. "Sorry, sir."

            The older Jyn got, the more she understood how Yung might have possibly annoyed a superior officer to the point of being exiled to Eadu, no matter how great her commitment to the Empire or how stellar her service record.

            A hand brushed over Jyn's hair, and she kept very still. "How did it happen?"

            "She was bored," Yung said, "so she did something kriffing stupid."

            "There isn't much here to keep her occupied," Galen allowed, and he sounded more cautious than really made sense to Jyn.

            "If I may speak freely?"

            "I don't outrank you, Lieutenant."

            The silence that followed was distinctly judgmental; rank aside, no one wanted to get on the bad side of someone who Krennic so clearly valued more than the rest of the laboratory's occupants combined. It was much the same reasoning that kept Jyn largely out of trouble for anything that didn't involve accidentally flinging herself from a great height. Perhaps Galen made some gesture, or perhaps Yung simply decided she had made her point, because she said, "With all due respect, sir, if I were in her shoes, I'd probably try to throw myself off a cliff to alleviate the boredom, too."

            "You make it sound like she fell intentionally."

            "No," Yung said, "although that might be how you should present it when you suggest to the Lieutenant Commander that I be allowed to escort her off world." The creak of gaberwool betrayed some motion from Yung, but with her eyes closed, Jyn couldn't tell if it was a shrug or a wave of the hand, or just her shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

            Jyn's papa was silent for a moment before he said, "You must be very eager to leave Eadu," and she could hear something that might have been a smile in his voice. She could definitely hear the faint, surprised sound that Yung made, although she would have thought that Yung would by now be used to the leaps of logic that Galen's mind could make. Maybe she had thought that all of his bright shining brilliance was limited to science and mathematics. Jyn knew better.

            Wool rubbed over wool again. "I didn't join the Imperial Navy to be stuck on a planet where I can't even see the stars. The laboratory runs itself so long as we're not shifting new troops in or out. They can spare me for a rotation or two. But don't let the fact that it'll benefit me deter you," Yung added, her voice so dry that, had Jyn ever seen a desert, she might have made the comparison. "Jyn gets a chance to see worlds beyond this one. Assuming that your daughter's happiness still ranks as a priority."

            It was clearly meant as a dig. Jyn was—baffled.

            "Are you attempting to manipulate me?" Galen asked. He didn't sound upset, his tone as mild as ever, and Jyn didn't need to dig too deep to figure out why that disappointed her.

            "Not really," Yung said. "She's a tolerable child. Much more tolerable now that she's less of a child, of course." She paused, and then added, as if concerned someone might have forgotten her views on the matter, "Children are awful."

            "I doubt Krennic would grant such a request from me," Galen said, and he sounded cautious again, testing.

            "Jyn Erso still has value to the Empire," Yung said, and the not-quite-affection that had colored her voice moments earlier was stripped away now, leaving nothing but the model officer behind. "So long as she still has value to you, that is."

            There was a warning there, a warning. Jyn was fourteen and had not inherited her father's genius—but she wasn't stupid, and she had spent years living in a place that had never quite felt safe, and she remembered the way that Krennic had said, easy and spiteful, _"He barely asks about you at all anymore,"_ the way he had not ever quite forgiven her for failing to like him when he had briefly exerted himself in attempting be likable. It was easy to make assumptions about what would happen, should the Empire decide that Jyn was no longer valuable.

            Galen was quiet. Finally he said, "I will bear that in mind, Lieutenant."

            "Do that," Yung said. The snap of her booted heels as she left drowned out the whisper of the door opening and closing behind her.

            The room was dark and still again, and Jyn began to wonder if her father had departed in Yung's wake, but then that familiar hand brushed over her forehead again, pushing back hair still tangled from the rain and from drying wound around the edges of her pillow.

            "Go back to sleep, Stardust," he said. "We'll talk about it in the morning."

 

            They didn't, but two days later Jyn was back in Yung's office, being told that, for the first time in six years, she would be permitted to leave Eadu.

 

            The first place that Yung took her was a nearby farming planet, not so different from the one Jyn had called home as a child, although the skies were brighter. After years on Eadu, Jyn had to resist the urge to flinch back into the hold of the ship. There were more people here than there had been on Lah'mu, with little clumps of buildings that might generously be called towns rather than just acres of farmland with houses freckling the otherwise unbroken green of the fields and black of the beaches, so far apart that the word _neighbor_ became something like a lie.

            Yung, who had been in a fine mood since the moment they had broken through Eadu's atmosphere, browsed market stalls and bought Jyn a rough-hewn square of some local candy. The taste was strange, more fruit-salt-spice than sweet and sticky enough that it clung to Jyn's fingertips and wormed its way under her nails.

            The last of it was melting on Jyn's tongue when the Stormtroopers came down the street, a full squad of eight marching in neat ranks, repeating blasters in their hands and masks over their faces that rendered them both instantly recognizable and utterly anonymous.

            "Some trouble here recently. Nothing to be concerned about. The dissenters have been taken care of," Yung explained. She glanced at Jyn and added hastily, "I wouldn't have brought you if I didn't think it was safe," as though that was the reason that the smile had abruptly dropped from Jyn's face.

 

            The trips off world were not frequent, but they were regular. The destination varied, and was always chosen by Yung. Jyn saw her first desert, and her first forest, and her first city that wasn't distantly-remembered Coruscant. Sometimes Yung had other business to conduct, and would leave Jyn with a brace of troopers or on board the shuttle until she was free to play escort; sometimes, the journey seemed little more than a pleasure jaunt, nominally intended to relieve the boredom of a fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old too valuable to risk and not valuable enough to be put to any purpose beyond _survive to be used_ (in comfort, because _you'll all live in comfort_ , except that Lyra Erso hadn't lived and Jyn was not comfortable, and she wondered if Krennic looked at what he had built and thought himself a man of his word).

            Sometimes the hands on the controls of the shuttle that carried them down to their most recent destination were Tag's rosy, big-knuckled ones, because he had more time on them now. More cargo pilots had been added to Eadu's roster, two of them and then four, and there was always at least one shuttle docked on the platform. Jyn knew without asking – because why ask when she knew that no answer would be forthcoming? – that whatever project her papa spent his days and nights hunched over was progressing. If all the new shipments of kyber crystals hadn't told her that, she would have known from the distinctly smug tilt of Krennic's mouth whenever he came swooping through the laboratory like the villain of some old holodrama.

            _" Whatever I do, I do it to protect you,"_ her papa had said, once and then twice. _"Trust the Force,"_ her mama had told her, the last thing that Lyra had ever told her. But it was hard to forgive her father the naked satisfaction on the face of the man who had killed her mother, and harder still to trust something she couldn't see or taste or touch, but which, if it existed, had allowed that death to occur.

 

            Tag had struck up a flirtation with the Twi'lek behind the bar in the little spaceport watering hole where he and Jyn had been playing cards, and it was going to end poorly. Not immediately, because he seemed to be making impressive headway with the bartender, but Yung had only left Jyn in his care under protest and she was going to murder one or both of them if she found out that Tag had brought Jyn here, much less that he had disappeared somewhere with one of the staff and left his charge unattended.

            Jyn could hear Yung now. This bar was Seedy (Jyn had counted at least fourteen Imperial uniforms among the crush, two of them belonging to officers, but she did not think for a moment that would assuage Yung's wrath). Jyn was turning into a Delinquent. Tag was a Bad Influence. To The Brig With Both Of Them.

            There was very little dissuading Tag once he had decided on an ill-advised but undoubtedly enjoyable course of action, however, so Jyn contented herself with rifling through the deck for better cards while he was otherwise occupied, just in case she had time to play out the hand and take the pot before Yung descended upon them, full to the brim with righteous fury.

            She caught the Star card between her fingers and hoped that the Abednedo in the corner hadn't caught her staring earlier. It was a difficult impulse to resist. There were few nonhumans among the Imperials, and brief exposure on a myriad of worlds over the years had not actually done as much as Jyn might have wished to acclimate her to the differences between Eadu and elsewhere, especially since even her time away from Eadu was so closely managed.

            "It looks like your friend has left you on your own," someone said from behind Jyn, and she tapped the corner of the card against the table twice before she turned.

            He was dressed in the uniform of an Imperial gunner, which rendered him immediately and significantly less interesting in her eyes, in spite of his handsome face. Most of the appeal of these little trips away from Eadu was the presence of people – human or otherwise – not draped in the Empire's colors. A droid hovered a few feet behind him, and that was a little more intriguing, because the KX-series were not exactly known for their stirring conversational skills. He must have been desperate for _any_ company if he had brought an enforcer droid out as a drinking companion. Probably that was why he was talking to her; most of the people here seemed to consider Tag's size a significant enough deterrent to avoid pestering his young friend. "Maybe that's how I prefer it," she said. Pointedly.  

            He hesitated, which was how she knew that he had _caught_ the intent of her statement and was just _deciding_ to ignore it. "Rare to see an Imperial pilot out with one of the locals," he tried. "Do you have many friends on the base?"

            She wasn't local, and Tag wasn't stationed here, although she supposed that, unlike Eadu, they saw enough through traffic that he couldn't be expected to know that. "No," she said flatly, and then, "Do _you_?"

            The corner of his mouth did something strange, like he had started to smile and then abruptly and comprehensively decided against it. Then his eyes shifted to focus on something behind her. That was all the warning she got before a heavy weight settled over her shoulders. She was being crushed. She could feel her spine attempting to fuse with the seat of her chair. Her feet had never been so thoroughly planted on the ground.

            She would have attempted to shrug off Tag's arm, but she knew it would be an exercise in futility.

            "This guy bothering you, Jyn?" he asked. He was smiling. It was a smile that might fill any soul with a sense of grim foreboding. Tag was an easygoing sort, and nothing _actually_ offended him, but he bored easily and would find ways to entertain himself, and sometimes he decided that a brawl sounded like very good fun. The people he brawled with rarely agreed. Jyn had gathered this from his stories, and from the very rare firsthand examples she had witnessed, which inevitably ended in Yung attempting to use her words to take a year off his life and feed it to him.

            " _You're_ bothering me," Jyn said, and Tag didn't stop smiling, but he did adjust the weight of his arm so that her vertebrae were no longer at risk of being reduced to rubble.

            Jyn's new would-be friend was watching them, and for just a moment, she thought she saw a flash of—of something pass behind his eyes, something calculating, a hint of irritation too sharp to be a proportionate response to Tag's posturing. Then it was gone, and he was backing away from their table with both hands raised. "I was just leaving."

            Tag turned his head to watch the man weave around them and then settled himself into the chair beside Jyn.

            "A retreat was wise. Did you calculate the odds of him using one of those shovels masquerading as hands to remove your spine from your body on your own?" someone asked from behind her. "Or would you like me to provide them for you?"

            Jyn twisted in her chair. By then, the gunner and his droid were nearly to the door, the droid towering above most of the rest of the bar's occupants.

            It couldn't have been them, in any case. KX-series droids weren't programmed for humor.

            "Don't think I couldn't see you cheating from the bar," Tag said as he scooped up his cards from the table, and the encounter was forgotten.

 

            It was summer when Tag died, or what passed for it on Eadu. Yung was the one who told Jyn, face impassive and her desk between them like a wall.

            "What happened?" Jyn asked.

            It was to be expected, of course. Jyn had heard the other cargo pilots talking. Food came from farming planets like the one where Yung had first taken Jyn, and even a farmer could get angry and lucky enough to do some harm before the inevitable blaster fire took him down. The crystals came from a place named Jedha, and apparently the fighting there had been particularly fierce; with the exception of Tag, _none_ of the pilots liked runs to Jedha, and they gladly passed him those assignments and the higher pay rate that came with them if given the chance. Jyn wasn't surprised, and she thought that she ought not to be sad, either, because even if he had only been in it for the pay, Tag had served the Empire, and if the Empire's enemies had gotten in a lucky shot then he had brought it upon himself.

            Her throat closed, so sudden and sharp it felt like choking, felt like being eight again and watching a body hit the ground and trying desperately not to make any noise, lest the Imperial standing on the other side of the long grass hear her, lest the Imperial on the other side of the desk realize.

            Yung hesitated. "He was skimming from shipments," she said finally. "There was—I was told that there was some evidence that he might have been using the profits he made to assist the rebels on Jedha."

            Tag would have never used the money he made to assist anyone except the Corellian economy, which he had contributed to significantly over the years by buying all of their fine exported alcohol. Jyn suspected that both she and Yung knew that.

            The silence stretched long and thin, and Yung was the one to finally break it. "His mother was Zeltron, you know," she said, apropos of nothing, or at least that was what Jyn thought until Yung stiltedly added, "You can't trust someone who isn't human."

            Jyn felt cold, brittle with it in her bones and cutting sharp through the rest of her, so she was surprised by how calm she sounded when she said, "They executed him, I suppose."

            "Jyn," Yung said, and later, Jyn would look back on the way that Yung's jaw clenched and the way her fingers shifted where they were folded on top of her desk, and realize that this was the moment when Yung decided not to spare either of them. "I pulled the trigger myself."

            She didn't say anything after that, just let Yung talk at her. Tag had left his personal effects to Jyn. She didn't read much into that, some greater message about the depth of their friendship or his lack of others. More than likely, he had jotted down her name on a whim. There were no credit chips among his things – either he had spent them all, which wasn't unlikely, or Yung had confiscated the money that Jyn wasn't permitted to have. There was an old nerf hide flight jacket, undoubtedly left over from a time before Tag had put on the one provided by the Empire, and Jyn shrugged it over her shoulders, rolled the sleeves up nearly half their length so that they would hit her at the wrist. She ignored Yung's eyes on her and took nothing else, and she left the rest of Tag's personal items spread across Yung's desk like a reproach, petty and vindictive because she had no power to be anything else.

            She went to find her father.

            By the time she reached his lab, the cold had melted away into something hotter but no less sharp, because Tag had earned his death, first by joining the Empire and then by attempting to cheat it, but she had so little left to lose that she thought it was probably no betrayal of her mother's memory to feel this loss, to hurt for herself, even if she wouldn't allow herself to hurt for him. Second shift was in the mess right now, and that never reliably meant anything when it came to the scientists or the engineers, who might get caught up in a problem and refuse to be torn away from it by something as silly as their need to consume food. Today, however, like some strange blessing, her father was alone, the tray with his meal sitting forgotten on the table beside his datapad, sauce slowly congealing on the plate.

            He glanced up when she entered, and then back down to his work. "Stardust," he said. "I'm afraid I don't really have time—."

            "How do you do it?" Jyn asked, and it was satisfying to watch whatever he had been about to say die on his lips. She wondered if anger had a flavor, if that was what she could taste on the back of her tongue. "How do you sit here and work for them? How can you stand it? How do you not choke on it every second of every day? After what they've done. With what they're doing."

            Galen was looking at her now, and there was some satisfaction in that too, in knowing that, for the moment, she couldn't be dismissed or ignored. "I don't have a choice," he said, and he sounded like he sometimes did when he was talking to Yung or to Krennic, like he knew that the ice he stood on was unstable but was still trying to figure out whether to step back or step forward to avoid the danger.

            "That's an excuse," Jyn said. "There's always a choice."

            Jyn wasn't stupid, but for a moment she wondered if she was, because that was simplistic, of course, that was naïve, and what choice had she ever had—.

            She stopped, brought up short by the thought so fast and so hard that she lost the momentum of her anger. No one had ever _given_ her a choice. That didn't mean she had been unable to make one. Eight had probably been too young to really fight back, but she had tried then, hadn't she? Had kicked and screamed and clawed at the people who had tried to contain her. She wondered when she had decided that she no longer cared to fight, when the hard pebble of fury in her stomach, closer to the surface now but never entirely out of reach, had stopped being motivation enough to do so.

            Her papa was watching her. There was something shadowed about his eyes. He looked tired, but he always looked tired, and she wondered when she had stopped noticing.

            "You've gotten so big," he said softly, the kind of non sequitur that she expected to hear from him when he had been working out a difficult problem in his head.

            "I'm seventeen," she said, and knew that he would hear the words that crowded her tongue after that: _I'm seventeen, and you missed it. You missed it, you were there every day, but you never looked_. "I just don't understand why you don't care anymore. You used to care." _About me_. The things left unsaid between them would never entirely be about the Empire.

            He nodded, accepting. "I always meant to tell you," he said.

            "Tell me what?"         

            He stepped forward, and he lifted his hand, slowly, telegraphing the movement, as though he half expected her to slap him away. Jyn wasn't sure she wouldn't, not until he had tucked a chunk of hair that had wormed its way loose from her bun behind her ear and let his arm fall back to his side.

            "Jyn. My Stardust," he said. "I need to know if you can keep a secret."

 

            He told her all of it, told her about kyber crystals and planet-killers and revenge and choice. Then he told her the rest:

            "I couldn't let Krennic think that having you here was a distraction," he said. They were sitting next to each other at one of the big work tables, and Jyn watched him out of the corner of her eye, his gaze turned toward her and something warm and almost relieved beneath the exhaustion on his face. "If he thought that too much of my time was spent with you, or that removing you would prove to be a better motivation than having you here with me—." He stopped, and Jyn knew that Krennic simply removing her from the lab hadn't been the only possibility that has presented itself to Galen. "I lied. I learned to lie. I played the part of the beaten man resigned to the sanctuary of my work. I let him think that your presence pleased me, but didn't absorb me, that there was no time to think of you because I was too busy thinking of the weapon that I would deliver to his hands."

            "Did you?" Jyn asked, and felt foolish for needing the reassurance but couldn't have stopped herself from asking right then even if she had tried. "Think of me?"

            His hand twitched, like he wanted to reach for her but was unsure of his welcome, or like he had suddenly remembered that she was no longer a child who could be pulled into his lap and be held. "Every day. I tried not to. I risked failure a dozen times, thinking of you, thinking of what they would do to you if my plans were ever found out." When she just nodded, the relief on his face deepened, but whatever recriminations Jyn had for her father, they were not for hobbling the weapon Krennic had demanded be built. "It was difficult for me too. I need you to know that. I saw the pain I caused you, how my actions hurt you. I know you think that I wasn't looking, but I was. Always."

            Jyn was thinking. She was thinking about what her father had done, and what she still might do, about choice. She was thinking about the lab they sat in, and the secrets it held, more secrets than just the Death Star, and rest the Eadu outside of it, the troopers and pilots who came and left and brought with them gossip about the outside world, distant planets where they had been posted, fleets of ships moving deep through space and serving terrible caf to their crews, upcoming assignments that they either anticipated or dreaded, and how little they thought about discussing those things in front of her, small and powerless and well-guarded as she was.

            "Can you forgive me?" Galen asked, and it did not sound like it had been an easy question to ask. "Not now, I wouldn't expect you to, but—I can't imagine what you must think of me, but it would be no small thing to think that I haven't lost you completely."

            She wasn't sure what answer she could give and have it be true, wasn't sure if she could or couldn't or had already. She thought that he probably hadn't lost her, but she wondered if either of them had any chance of finding their way back to each other. Years weren't erased by a single conversation, couldn't be.

            He still wasn't something that she could turn and walk away from, though. He never had been. She thought their chances of finding their way back to being family (small, crippled, marked by the absence of an essential piece, but family nonetheless) might be better if they were at least walking in the same direction. She thought about the lab and all of its many secrets, and thought about making a choice.

            Galen's hand was still resting out in front of him. Slowly, Jyn raised her own and wrapped her fingers around his, the sleeve of her new jacket sliding up her arm as it brushed against the edge of the table. "I am not lost," she said.

 

            Yung gave Jyn a week before she appeared at the door to Jyn's room. "I've let you mope and avoid me long enough," she said. "Come on. There's a restaurant in the Minos Cluster I think you'll like."

            A lot could happen in a week.

            Jyn rose from her bed without so much as uttering a protest, although she dearly wanted to, wanted to offer up some very choice words about how sudden trips and exotic foodstuffs were not enough to smooth out anything that had gone wrong between them. "Give me a minute to pack."

            Yung eyed her suspiciously; obviously, she had expected more of a fight. Jyn made note of that. From now on, she aimed to meet Yung's expectations _precisely_.

            "I don't need you here to do it," Jyn snapped, and watched as Yung relaxed, even as she frowned her disapproval at Jyn's tone.

            "Fine. I'll meet you on the platform."

            " _Saw Gerrera,"_ her father had told her. _"That's who you'll need to find a way to contact."_

            The shuttle waiting when Jyn stepped outside wasn't new, but the pilot sitting inside it clearly was; his hands moved confidently over the controls as he did he pre-launch checks, but his shoulders were rigid and he cast a nervous look toward Yung when she stomped her way on board. Jyn followed more quietly, dropping her bag on one of the benches before dropping herself into the copilot's seat. Tag had never had a problem with her sitting there. She waited for the new pilot to object.

            He didn't.

            "So, you're the replacement pilot," Jyn said, and she would admit that when she lifted her legs and rested the soles of her boots against the edge of the console, out of his way but still well within his work space, it was small and petty and mostly intended to see if she could get a rise out of him. It wasn't fair to dislike someone because she had liked their predecessor and their predecessor was now dead, but Jyn was no longer certain she was interested in being even a little bit fair to the men and women who willingly signed their lives over to the Empire.

            He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He was not as young as she had initially thought – she would have placed him somewhere between her age and Yung's – so maybe he wasn't so new, maybe he was tense because the _assignment_ was new, or because the commander he was now assigned to looked like she was ready to chew on someone until they were small enough for her to spit out. Jyn supposed that she would have every opportunity to find out, if she decided that she wanted to.

            "Yes," he said. "I'm am the pilot."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to offer a big, huge thank you to everyone who kudos'd or commented. It's been long enough since I last stuck my toe into a new fandom that I think I had forgotten how nerve-wracking it can be, and y'all have _been a balm to my troubled soul_.
> 
> If you want to come say hi, I'm [over on Tumblr](http://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/).


	3. Chapter 3

            "No luck?" Galen asked. Jyn flung herself down into a chair hard enough that it rocked backwards precariously before settling back onto its base.

            The lab, and the office attached to it designated for her father's use, were safe enough for private conversation so long as there were no other people within earshot. Galen had discovered long ago that no one monitored what went on inside Eadu remotely. Krennic was too paranoid about leaks to allow it, because any tool he used to watch his pet scientists might be subverted. It wasn't the Empire's enemies that worried him; it was his own political rivals.

            That he was reliant on Galen's fellow scientists for reports on Galen's progress was probably part of why Galen had so successfully stalled development all these years. They were brilliant men but, when it came to brilliance, no one quite rivaled Galen Erso.

            "None," Jyn said, and tried not to sound grumpy about it. Not sounding grumpy was more difficult than it ought to have been: three trips from Eadu and six months had passed, and she was no closer to finding Saw Gerrera than she ever had been. "No one knows where to find him."

            (This was not true. There were a great many people who knew where Saw Gerrera could be found, at least in the general sense. The citizens and pilgrims of Jedha City knew Saw's name, and knew to duck into their homes or nearby shops when they heard it, before the blaster fire started. The cargo pilots who docked their ships at Eadu knew it too, because his was the name that had turned what ought to have been a routine run into something more like running the gauntlet.

            Bodhi Rook was both.

            Jyn never thought to ask him. She wouldn't have, even if she had thought to. She was done making friends with people who wore the uniform of the Empire.)

 

            Bodhi Rook was not someone Jyn was interested in calling friend but, like most of the people who lived on or worked out of Eadu, he was an unavoidable reality of her days. Yung seemed to prefer that he be the one to pilot them when they left Eadu. In her more cynical moments, Jyn thought that Yung liked Bodhi because he never seemed to quite overcome the first impression he had of her, and therefore lived in mild terror of her displeasure. In her more generous ones, she thought that Yung probably had the wariness of one burned in regards to subordinates who weren't cowed by her temper.

            It wasn't very often that Jyn felt generous, these days.

            It was hard not to gain at least a little familiarity with a person when proximity was unavoidable. Jyn still insisted on claiming her customary seat in the copilot's chair (on the rare occasion when there was a copilot on board, this resulted in a few very intense staring contests). Once, after they had broken through the atmosphere but before Bodhi could engage the hyperdrive, she breathed in her first glimpse of the stars and absently asked, "Do you ever think about just not dropping back into realspace? Find the edge of the galaxy and just—keep going?"

            Once she realized what she had said, she wished she could take it back. It was too close to small talk, and not the kind she should be making with someone loyal to the Empire.

            "No," Bodhi said, and paused for a moment before adding, "but only because once I was away from the charted hyperspace routes, I'd probably crash into a sun or something."

            He turned his head to look at her, but Jyn had seen it coming, and had already turned away. He didn't seem to mind. In that, Bodhi Rook was something of an anomaly. He knew she didn't like him, and didn't trust him, and neither of those things significantly impacted how he behaved toward her: kind, on most days, in an offhanded sort of way, cranky when Yung had bitten his head off over some triviality or when he was returning from a run to Jedha (it hadn't taken very long for Jyn to notice that he disliked being assigned to Jedha even more than the other pilots did, and only slightly longer for the gossip that Jyn now made it a point to acquire to inform her that Jedha was his home world), and always vaguely giving off the impression that he would be her friend if offered the smallest amount of encouragement.

            Maybe a year after he had been assigned to Eadu, he paused with his hands on the controls of the cargo ship that was his as much as any of the Empire's ships could belong to her pilot. From the dock behind them, they could both hear Yung very politely, very officially snarling her way through a conversation about a clerical error that was currently keeping them from disembarking.

            "She's going to notice that you keep sneaking off, you know," Bodhi said, and he darted a glance at her.

            Jyn's heart froze somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, and then dropped suddenly and uncomfortably into the pit of her stomach. All she could think was that she was a terrible spy, so terrible that she was going to get herself caught and killed before she even had a chance _to_ spy. If it hadn't been so bad, it would have been hilarious. Tag would have laughed. Then again, Tag was also dead, because he had been as bad at theft as she was at espionage.

            "I'm not doing anything I shouldn't be," Jyn said, with as much conviction as she could muster, and then undermined it immediately by adding, "You can't tell her."

            "Oh, hey, no," Bodhi said quickly, lifting his hands from the console so that he could wave them, like he would bat her concerns out of the air between them. "No, I wouldn't. I mean, you're what, like sixteen?" She was eighteen by then, but short enough that the mistake wasn't uncommon, and she felt a little too breathless to bother with correcting him. "You should be able to have some fun. Just, uh, don't do anything too dangerous, yeah? Check out the dupie races, have a couple drinks, stay away from any dark alleys. Right?"

            She didn't trust him.

            (That did not mean he wasn't trustworthy.)

            "Right," Jyn breathed, and it felt like the first breath she had taken since he had started speaking. "Nothing dangerous," she lied, but when she said, "Thank you," she very nearly meant it.

 

            This was the same trip during which all of Jyn's efforts of the past year – the past ten years, perhaps – finally paid off.

            Yung had gotten more lax recently. Jyn would have liked to take it as a sign of guilt, but really it seemed that Yung had found some other preoccupation, something that distracted her and prevented her from paying as much close attention to Jyn as she once had. She personally escorted Jyn less when Jyn went to explore these new, strange worlds, leaving those duties to the troopers who accompanied them or – more rarely – to Bodhi. She'd often offered some reason to visit the planets that she chose beyond Jyn's entertainment, some bit of business to complete for Krennic or an old friend from her days training to serve the Empire to visit, but now her absences were more frequent. Or perhaps it wasn't guilt, or some new distraction. Perhaps she was just avoiding Jyn, who had made a special effort over the past year to be an even less genial companion than she once had been. Whatever the case might be, Jyn wasn't bothered. She was just grateful that it minimized the time she had to spend with the most attentive of her keepers.

            Often they stayed on military bases or in diplomatic quarters, which also limited Jyn's movements and made sneaking out more difficult, but this time they were on Alderaan, and the Empire had little space to offer to a couple of strays on leave here – not in the least because Alderaan was not inclined to clutter her picturesque surface with facilities for Imperial soldiers or diplomats. They stayed in a hotel, and it was the easiest thing in the world to wait until Yung left with a warning that she shouldn't be expected back until very late, and then to rifle through Yung's bag for the loose credit chips that someone who was allowed to have such things might keep there. Jyn was not worried about Yung noticing their absence. By the end of the night, there would be nothing to notice.

            A brief conversation with a hotel employee in the lobby provided her with a key card to her room, effectively turning her into the jailor of her own cell, because Jyn's ability to widen her eyes imploringly had become much improved over the past several years and because she _was_ actually registered as a hotel guest, albeit under a false name – Liana Hallik, this time. The name _Erso_ was recognizable enough still (again) that Yung never allowed there to be a record left behind of Jyn's presence.

            Of her existence.

            She was not looking for Saw Gerrera tonight. She'd had it in her head for some time that it would be no bad thing to have some money of her own stashed away – for what, she didn't know, except that on some of the planets they visited it was awfully hard to strike up a conversation with someone unless she offered to buy them a drink first, and it was awfully hard to do _that_ without a single credit to her name. Luckily, with what she had taken from Yung's bag, Jyn could get the capital she needed.

            _Every hostage needs a seedy hobby or two_ , Tag had told her, the first day they had met. It turned out that he was right.

 

            The city of Aldera was beautiful, spires of pale synthstone piercing the night sky like the strange and graceful cousins of the nearby mountains. Around her, Jyn could hear the accent of the Core, her accent, her mother's accent, but there was not a single Imperial uniform for as far as she could see. For that alone, Jyn would have considered it the most lovely planet she had been to yet.

            Even on the galactic center of culture and beauty, however, there were still places where someone could go to gamble away their pay. Those places just tended to be prettier.

            She started low stakes. Playing on an actual sabacc table with an actual suspension field took some getting used to, but when she lost she didn't lose big, and people playing for pittance didn't look askance at her baggy jacket or scuffed boots. The droids of Eadu still provided her with clothing worthy of the daughter of an Imperial science officer, but by now it was a point of pride to wear only the most worn and disreputable parts of her wardrobe, the ones that she liked to imagine would smudge the pristine white of Krennic's cape if he ever stood too close to her.

            By the time that she decided she didn't dare risk being away from the hotel much longer, Jyn's winnings were not what she would have liked but they were enough, at least, that she would not need to go digging through Yung's things again for seed money. They were enough for her to stop by the bar before racing the time back to the hotel.

            She was not looking for Saw Gerrera tonight, so she did not expect to find him. And she didn't. Not—quite.

            What she _did_ do was accept her drink and glance reflexively to the left when someone beside her let loose a sharp, too-loud bark of laughter. She then considered changing seats, because the middle-aged man with the bushy eyebrows and the expensive clothing of Adleraanian cut seemed inoffensive enough, in spite of having nearly deafened her in one ear, but the fellow next to him was dressed in the uniform of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps, the rank plaque on his chest indicating that he was a—senior aide? Or was it junior attaché? Mostly Jyn met soldiers; she'd had few opportunities to practice distinguishing between the ranks of diplomats. She was still trying to figure out which one it was when she saw his face.

            By the time she'd managed to place him, he had shifted so that his companion's broad back was blocking her view. She wondered if that was intentional. She sipped her drink and eavesdropped on their conversation (something about spiced wine exports, which was not particularly interesting, and something about stolen Hammerhead corvettes, which almost was), and when the diplomat with his familiar face got up to leave, she rose to follow him.

            He was waiting for her outside, which wasn't surprising. For a moment they just stood there, allowing the late night foot traffic to part around them, before he jerked his head toward the space between the curved side of one building and the next.

            _Stay away from any dark alleys_ , Bodhi Rook had said, and that seemed like excellent advice, but it had been a year since she had started down this road and she was starting to feel desperate, so she ignored Bodhi's good advice and her own better judgment, and stepped into the darkness of the alley.

            "I was wondering if you'd recognized me," said the gunner from the spaceport watering hole she had visited with Tag, what felt like eons ago.

            "I did," Jyn said, because there seemed no point in denying it. Then, because her impulse to be as disrespectful as possible to anyone in uniform was deeply ingrained, she felt compelled to add, "I wanted to congratulate you on your promotion. Naval gunner to senior aide for the Diplo-Serv in less than two years. I can honestly say that I've never heard of a career move like it."

            The light was dim enough that she couldn't see his face very well, but she didn't think he was amused by her, mostly because she _could_ see the way that his hand hung by his side, close to where his short cape draped over his hip. Yung had refused to teach her how to use a blaster, but she had been adamant about teaching Jyn to spot the signs that someone else was carrying one.

            She did not like Bodhi well enough to allow him to say _I told you so_ at her funeral. "I'm trying to find Saw Gerrera."

            The light was dim enough that she couldn't see his face very well, but it wasn't dim enough to keep her from seeing the way that his jaw clenched, or the way that he forced his hand to relax away from the weapon hidden at his hip.

            "You know the name," Jyn said.

            "I do," he acknowledged. "I'm interested to know why you thought I would."

            "When we met before," Jyn said, "you were just full of interesting questions. Were my friends Imperials? How friendly _was_ I with the Imperials? Did I, perhaps, have access to the local base? Would I, perhaps, be willing to tell a friendly Imperial gunner things he ought to already know about the local base?"

            "I never asked you that last one."

            Tag's arm, heavy across her shoulders. Tag wearing a smile like a vibroknife. _This guy bothering you?_ "You never had the chance."

            The slow breath he released sounded irritated. He was going to shoot her, Jyn thought, and she would probably deserve it.

            Instead he asked, "Why do you want to find Gerrera?"

            "My father knew him," Jyn said, which was enough truth that she thought it might sound like she was telling all of it. She wasn't sure. She didn't have much experience yet with lying to people who weren't predisposed to believe her. "Can you help me?"

            His answering silence was long and reluctant enough that she thought he wouldn't answer. "I might be able to. We work for the same cause," he said eventually, voice too cautious for the fact that she had already made clear that she had guessed he was a spy. "Who _are_ you?"

            "Someone in the midst  of a crisis of conscience," Jyn said, and that one was a lie, a lie in truth. Serving the Empire wasn't something Jyn had done. It was something that had been done to her. "Someone with access to the kind information that Saw might find useful. Can you help me, or not?"

            "That's not a name," he said. "If you want me to get word to Gerrera, give me a name he'll recognize. He's a cautious man."

            Jyn hesitated. Had it been Saw, who her father still spoke of with the reverence of a man who owed a debt, perhaps she would have given her real name and hoped that years weren't enough to blunt both memories and trust shared, but secrets weren't the only reason that Yung never allowed her to be Jyn Erso outside of Eadu. _Erso_ was a name with baggage attached to it, especially for an enemy of the Empire, belonging as it did to a cog in the Imperial war machine, and no small and simple cog, either, not the kind easily replaced if damaged or lost. _Erso_ was the target her father had unwillingly painted on his family's back, even if now the people aiming for it were different, and no matter how much Jyn might wish to say _I am Galen Erso's daughter, and Galen Erso is an honorable man_ , that was not the kind of secret she wished to pass into hands still hovering so close to a blaster. "Liana Hallik," she said, because at least there was a record of a Liana Hallik disembarking from a ship flying under Imperial colors on Alderaan. He seemed the sort who would check. "Although I don't think he'll recognize it."

            "That's not the name your friend called you by," he said, and Jyn suddenly remembered that Tag, who was always incautious and who had never been one to take Yung's adherence to rules and regulations seriously even when doing so made sense, had used her real name that night in the bar.

            "A nickname," Jyn said. "My friend is dead. I don't use it anymore."

            Truth, just enough truth to sound like all of it. (And a bereavement was enough to stop any conversation dead in the black; Tag had taught her that, even if he hadn't meant it to be a lesson: _"Your mom still in the picture, kid?"_ The silence after she had answered had been resounding, and the awkwardness that had colored the next two hands of sabacc had lingered even into his next visit, weeks later.)

            To his credit, the not-a-gunner, not-a-diplomat didn't offer condolences that she wouldn't have bought coming from him for the death of an Imperial pilot. She wasn’t sure whether he believed her about the name. She didn't think she cared if he didn't. _Jyn_ was a common name, and meant nothing without _Erso_ attached.

            "I can help you," he said, short, and with an air of indifference that could have been carefully feigned or entirely real, for all that Jyn could tell. "A name he won't recognize might not be enough for Saw to contact you directly, but I can tell you how to pass word, and if your information is any good I'll make sure that it's seen by the right eyes for it to be put to use."

            She didn't trust him.

            (He wasn't trustworthy.)

            She thought about the plans for weapons and armor and ships that would shape the future of the war, dreamed into being by a dozen of the Empire's brightest minds and destined to be made reality by all of her willing hands. She thought about the internal correspondence and carefully guarded data her father had been able to pull from the workstations on Eadu over the years, in the brief moments when no one was looking and before all of that information was transferred off site. She thought of her own carefully hoarded knowledge, gleaned in bits and pieces from those of the troopers stationed on Eadu who would speak to her or overheard in conversation between those who would not, stories of distant bases or the petty feuds between past commanders, of ships sliding like eels through the darkness of space, stories easily shared to stave off the boredom of a slow assignment guarding a place that barely existed according to Imperial records and which, if it had existed, was parsecs away from the ears of anyone who might reprimand them – little bites of information that might not feed her, but could be turned into a meal for someone with a longer reach.

            "My information is good." She didn't trust him, but she didn't have to, because he was – for now, at least – the best she was going to get.

            "We'll see,"

            "What do I call you?" Jyn asked.

            He stared at her for a moment, the scant illumination from street turning the bones of his face into something strange and abstract: the edge of his nose and jaw, the lashes of one dark eye limed with light and the other just the barest glint in the shadows, both of them unblinking.

            "Fulcrum," he said.

 

            "You don't usually sleep this late," Yung complained the next morning. Then she kicked the edge of Jyn's bed, because Yung was awful in small and petty ways that no one except Jyn really gave her credit for, probably because everyone else was too focused on the big and terrifying ways in which she could be awful.

            "Sorry," Jyn grumbled. "I had a long, busy night, examining the walls and doing nothing."

            She cracked open an eye in time to imagine that she saw the expression on Yung's face soften. "I guess you haven't had much chance to see Alderaan. We're leaving this afternoon, but we probably have time to do some exploring before that. See the sights. I hear there are sights to see, if that's your thing."

            Her tone implied that it was emphatically not _her_ thing, and revealed the gesture for what it was: a peace offering, and a hand extended in the name of not-friendship.

            It wasn't the first Yung had tried in the past year.

            "Where were you last night?" Jyn asked, opening her other eye.

            "Nowhere I'm telling you about," Yung said bluntly, her expression going shuttered. "Do you want to get out of this room, or not?"

            In the back of Jyn's head, there was new information: planets, moons, space stations, and the dead drops that could be found on each them. She had recited the list in a dark alley until the man who called himself Fulcrum had been satisfied, because this was not the kind of information that could be trusted to a sheet of flimsi or a datacard. "Not," Jyn said, and made a show of turning over and closing her eyes again. "I've already seen all I need to see of Alderaan."

            (Three years later, Jyn would regret that flippant answer, but by then it was far too late to give a different one.)

 

            The only thing she wanted to do when they returned to Eadu was find Galen and tell him what had transpired, but Jyn had learned the patterns of the laboratory now, the way that it inhaled and exhaled and when it slept; she knew when it was most likely that going there would leave her alone with her papa, or when it would be so scarcely occupied and its few occupants so deeply absorbed in their work that they wouldn't even notice if she came in and made herself comfortable in Galen's office.

            She was not expecting to find Bodhi Rook there. Bodhi had never been there before, and so did not figure into her calculations. Jyn looked at him, the same look she had leveled an more than one of his would-be copilots who had mistakenly assumed that the chair beside the pilot was to be theirs, and Bodhi actually muttered, "yes, very wrong of me, I see that now," and took a reflexive step toward the door and away from danger before Galen raised a hand to forestall him.

            "Hold on," Galen said, voice absent, the whole of his attention focused on the Imperial issue comlink in his hands, as if that dinged piece of metal and circuitry was one of his research projects and required all of his focus. "I'm almost finished here."

            Jyn might have offered at least a token protest, but it didn't take Galen more than two seconds longer to finish whatever he was doing and click the comlink's outer casing back into place. He offered it to Bodhi with a flourish, accepted the murmured thanks with grace, and watched as Bodhi practically bolted for the door with what could only be described as _concern_.

            "I hope his nerves are more steady when he's flying," Galen mused. He looked at Jyn as she fell into the chair next to him, and his expression went soft and fond in a way that might  have been embarrassing had Jyn had a less abnormal upbringing and gone fewer years without seeing it. "He's has something very precious to me on board, after all."

            "Kyber crystals?" Jyn asked, and was rewarded with the kind of hastily smothered smile that told her he found her amusing but took Yung's dire warnings about her impending delinquency too seriously to encourage her. The smile left something warm and glowing in the pit of Jyn's stomach that for once wasn't anger; one of the unexpected gifts of relearning her father was finding that he not only loved her, but seemed to like her all right as well.

            She was appeased, but not distracted. "What was he doing here?"

            "I heard him say in the mess that his comlink was acting up, giving him feedback," Galen said with a shrug. "I offered to take a look."

            "Isn't that what the wrench jockeys are for?"

            "I didn't mind doing it," Galen said. He studied her for a moment. "You look like you have news."

            Jyn breathed, and for just a moment allowed herself feel the immensity of what she was setting out to do, and the risks she was taking to do it. "Yes."

 

            Jyn had a list of a dozen planets, and it was easier than she would have thought, having never made the attempt before, to steer Yung in the direction of one of her choosing. The most difficult part had been finding a excuse for why she might _want_ to go visit a backwater moon with little to recommend it beyond the bustling mechanical trade that supported the Imperial shipyard there – neither of which Jyn had shown any interest in before, and both of which would probably arouse suspicion if she suddenly developed an interest _now_.

            "I hear they eat mynock there," Jyn said, because her limited HoloNet access had given her very little beyond some raving – if slightly confused – reviews of a Twi'lek chef who had decided to move his restaurant from Coronet City to the Outer Rim for "inspiration." (And, it was implied, lower operating costs and a steady supply of his favorite ingredient.)

            "How did we raise you so wrong?" Yung muttered, and Jyn could have provided a long list of answers, but reminding Yung that the list began with _killed my mama in front of my eyes and then separated me from my papa and kept me confined to a room for a year_ did not actually seem the way to accomplish her goals.

            "Fine," Yung said with a shrug. "I'll see what I can do."

            The moon was as unimpressive as Jyn had imagined. The dead drop was tucked inside of the base of a deactivated WED maintenance droid sitting outside of a repair shop, exactly where Jyn had been told it would be. She slipped the datacard into the proper place while pretending to inspect the droid, and then forced herself to walk away and not look back. It was done. The information would make its way into the right hands, or it wouldn't, and either way her role in this was finished.

            She hated not knowing.

            The mynock was pretty good, though.

 

            The first time that Jyn found Bodhi in her father's lab was, sadly, not the last.

            "—this one, you should have seen her, she had these legs," Bodhi was saying, hands spread to illustrate a frankly unlikely length of leg, more enthusiasm on his face and in his voice than Jyn had ever seen him show for anything, save maybe those first few moments after his ship broke through the atmosphere and the stars rose up before them.

            "Do I even want to know what you're talking about?" Jyn wondered.

            "Odupiendo racing, I believe," Galen said mildly, and Jyn remembered Bodhi mentioning a dupie race once before, and was forced to concede that the caught-out expression on his face was probably more because she had found him in the lab and less because he had anything to be embarrassed over.

            When Bodhi had retreated from the lab, Jyn turned her attention and her open skepticism on her father.

            "I think he's lonely here," Galen said. "Be kinder, Jyn. He's a good man."

            "The Empire doesn't hire those," Jyn said shortly, and it was only after she saw the way that Galen went silent and still that she realized what she had said. "I didn't mean—."

            "Hush," Galen said, and his shoulders were still tense and raised like those of man in the moment after a slap, but he reached out to cover her hand with his own. "I know."

 

            Another year passed, and with it, another half dozen innocuous datacards abandoned in equally innocuous locations. One was left between the pages of a biography of certain politician who had been only tangentially involved in the formation of the Galactic Republic and whose life had been so dull outside of that single glancing accomplishment that even the most steadfast collector of paper antiques would have shied away. The proprietor of the shop took one look at Jyn's clothing and asked her to leave. He didn't even seem to recognize her when she appeared the next day in the only dress she had packed, the one she wore when her culinary explorations with Yung would have been forestalled by scuffed boots or worn sleeves, and his expression was that of a man desperately hoping to see a difficult piece of stock finally move when she picked up the book, the first she had held in her life.

            She left another beneath a very specific seat on the sightseeing hovertrain of a Mid Rim world, and another one in a canister sculpted to look like one of several mostly identical rocks in the shallow end of a fishing pond in the tucked away corner of a private estate that she definitely should not have been trespassing on, after an afternoon spent hunting for it and sweating through her shirt at the thought of being caught. It didn't stop feeling like shouting into an abyss, hoping that someone would hear her and never knowing if they did – she and Yung rarely visited the same planet twice, and there was no way to check and see whether those same places were empty a week or a month later, no way to know, even if she had been able to check, whether the right people had emptied them.

            Which was why it came as a pleasant surprise near the end of that year to open the lockbox buried at the edge of a public park in Iziz and find a piece of flimsi, nothing on it except _where are you getting all this?!?!?_ She wanted to imagine that it had been Fulcrum who had left it, mostly because the idea tickled her, but she couldn't picture him leaving a hastily scribbled, almost conversational little note in one of the dead drops on the off chance that she might choose this one and see it. She also couldn't picture him using that much enthusiastic punctuation. Such a simple thing, but it made her smile until Yung commented on her change in behavior and Jyn had to find an excuse to pick a fight. The abyss had finally shouted back.

            The next time she did a drop there was a new list, which was a relief, because she was on number eight of the twelve she had originally been given and she wasn't sure if she was supposed to repeat, wasn't sure she'd be able to even if she was supposed to. As such, her relief was somewhat dimmed when she saw that the list was actually a list of one, and that it named the same moon and the same repair shop where she had deposited her first datacard of smuggled information. She supposed she could pretend to have developed a taste for curried mynock and tell Yung—.

            Beside the name of the moon and the shop was a third name: _Ora Melany'lya_. It took her a moment to realize that this was not some further, obscure instruction, but a name. They – Fulcrum, or whoever he had leaving her little love notes in dead drops – were telling her to speak to someone.

            It felt like trust. Not a lot, but some, more than Jyn might have been willing to offer – although, granted, she had fewer names to give, since her little network consisted of her and her papa and not the dozens or hundreds of people that Saw might have and might be willing to risk to see if she _could_ be trusted. She hadn't expected trust, not even such a small portion of it as this. She hadn't known she'd wanted it until it was in her hands.

            "Should we tell them about the Death Star?" Jyn asked Galen once she had returned to Eadu, because of course they had named it something like _Death Star_ ; the lack of subtlety might have been funny had they been talking about anything other than the obliteration of whole plants.

            Galen thought, and Jyn waited. That she wouldn't reveal the Death Star's existence to her newfound allies without Galen's blessing had been an unspoken assumption between them, because the sneaking around and the smuggling of information might be hers, but this was his, no matter how little he had wanted it to be. Galen had been the one to build the heart of the star with its hidden flaw; he could choose when they would put that weapon into the hands of people who could actually use it.

            "Not yet," he said eventually. "The reactor core isn't even in place, and I haven't been able to work out a way to make it accessible to an outside strike." He paused, and his expression turned distant and thoughtful for a moment. Jyn knew that she had lost him to the problem, but it didn't bother her as much as it once had, and the moment passed, Galen shaking his head as he discarded whatever he had been considering. "The bulk of the project has already been moved once because it drew too much rebel attention. I would be telling them of the sword hanging over their head without giving them a way to cut themselves loose. I would not give them fear if I cannot also give them hope."

            Jyn wasn't sure that was the right decision, and she'd had no such guarantees with any of the information she'd passed along, but she nodded her acquiescence. The Death Star was Galen's, and like her, he had little enough left to him that she wouldn't take even this small measure of control over something he'd never wanted to claim.

 

            "Mynock again?" Yung asked with the weariness of a woman besieged on all sides by teenagers with terrible taste in galactic delicacies, but she gave in.

            The repair shop was much as it had been the last time Jyn had visited, the maintenance droid still out front. This time she stepped inside, and tried not to resent the two troopers who Yung had sent with her, or Bodhi, bored enough after two visits to the shipyard to go with them and hovering behind the troopers like a scruffy shadow. He, at least, seemed much more willing to break off and explore on his own than the troopers were, once he had taken in the jumbled mechanical treasure hunt that Jyn had so generously laid before him.

            There was a Bothan behind the counter, old enough that the fine hairs on her muzzle and the longer ones twisted up on top her head were both a grizzled gray. She beckoned Jyn forward with one furred hand and a shopkeeper's smile, and although she seemed to be missing most of her teeth, one of the few remaining ones was an impressively pointed canine. "Come here, girl. If nothing else here tempts you, I do have a few little shiny things that might catch your eye in the back."

            "I don't really have any money to spend," Jyn said, more for the benefit of the troopers, as she wove her way between droid parts (including an arm, pinned to the rack in such a way that it seemed to be waving toward the door) and mechanical bits cluttering the space between her and the counter.

            "You," the Bothan said quietly, once Jyn was close enough to lean in and pretend to examine the wares that the Bothan began to lay out on the counter between them, "are not what I was led to expect. And you bring company with you that I didn't expect, also."

            "I couldn't shake them," Jyn said, and bit back the apology that wanted to follow. "You're Ora Melany'lya?"

            The Bothan considered her for a long moment. "I don't think I've ever heard my family and clan name mangled quite so badly. Just _Ora_ will do. I have something for you, if you want it."

            "I want it," Jyn said. She didn't even have to think her answer over, although perhaps she should have.

            Ora smiled, muzzle gaping to reveal that one sharp tooth. "There are a couple local boys who want to cause some mischief. They need a way into the shipyard. Think you can arrange that?"

            Jyn had no idea. "Give me a few hours. I'll meet them here."

            "Good," Ora said. "Now, if you'll excuse me," her gaze drifted to where Bodhi was crouched near one of the display racks, "I believe I have an actual, paying customer to see to."

            A few hours. That was _probably_ enough time to come up with a plan.

 

            Sneaking out was much more difficult with a sack stuffed full of armor over her shoulder, but Jyn managed. The repair shop was closed by the time that Jyn got there, but Ora let her at the side door. "No names," Ora said, a faint growl of warning to her voice.

            One of the "local boys" was as human as Jyn; the other was another Bothan, who clutched a box to his chest and shifted so nervously from foot to foot that Jyn thought he might be even younger than her, perhaps only barely more than a boy in truth. She wondered if either of them were really local.

            "My brother," the human said blandly, with a smirk on his face that dared her to challenge him.

            "I can see the family resemblance," Jyn said, just as blandly. "Your parents must be very proud." The human's smirk widened into a grin, and Jyn exchanged a glance with the Bothan, one which she was fairly certain was meant to convey _well, at least one of us is having fun_.

            (Neither of the brothers would survive to see the end of the war, although both of them came close. One would die on Hoth, the other on Kothlis. Perhaps their parents would have mourned them, had either of them had any other family left to mourn.)

            Jyn dumped her sack on the ground. Hard white armor spilled out across the scarred duracrete of the floor, gleaming white, cleaner and more awful than anything that was stocked in Ora's shop. "Put this on."

            When they reached the gate to the shipyard, Jyn presented her identicard and waited with the most visible impatience she could muster for the guard to check her for clearance. His scanner beeped, but he didn't move aside to let her in. "I'm not showing any record of you leaving the base."

            "Not _my_ fault they didn't bother to log me on my way out," Jyn said, the easy insolence she had spent over a decade perfecting, long before she had ever decided to see if her limited skills at bluffing sabacc were good enough for spycraft. "I wouldn't mention it to the Lieutenant, though. I had an escort with me, but she gets _awfully tetchy_ if she doesn't know where I am at all times."

            The silence that followed this proclamation was pronounced enough that Jyn was certain that at some point during this visit or the last, he had seen what Yung looked like _tetchy_. "We just had a shift change," he offered.

            "I'm not saying it's _your_ fault," she said, "I'm just saying it's not mine, either."

            She waited for him to challenge her as she stepped past him. He didn't. There was a great deal to be said for sneaking into a place where everyone expected her to be.

            She turned down the path that would have led them to the officer's quarters, where she and Yung were staying, but once they were out of sight she took a different branch that would take them closer to the shipyard. She checked to make sure that the path was otherwise unoccupied before turning to her two armored shadows. "All right. I got you in. Where do you need to be?"

            It was hard to tell under the Stormtrooper helmets she had provided, but she thought the taller of the two was the human. "What do you think?" he asked. "Close enough?"

            The Bothan nodded, and leaned down to put the box he had been carrying on the ground. The guard at the gate hadn't even asked about it; either invoking Yung had rattled him that bad, or he assumed that she used Stormtroopers to carry the items she wasn't actually permitted to shop for. When the box touched the ground, something thumped against the inside, scooting it a few inches to the left.

            "There, there, my beauties," the Bothan crooned. Jyn hadn't even been aware that Bothan vocal chords were capable of producing a croon, but he managed it. "You'll be free soon enough, and there are so many delicious things for you to enjoy here."

            He opened the box. Something – possibly several somethings – burst from inside, leaving Jyn with the impression of pale, leathery wings and not much else.

            "They're immature," the Bothan said with satisfaction, "but they grow up so fast, you know? And then they make more."

            "He likes them," the human offered. He pulled off his helmet, hair sweaty and disarranged beneath it, and looked in the direction that the creatures had gone, for all that they were now long out of sight. "Me? I like the amount of damage that an infestation of them will do to an Imperial shipyard before the troops here manage to put them all down."

            "Please don't remind me that I'm sending my babies off to die for the cause," the Bothan said. Jyn couldn't tell if he was joking.

            "Mynocks?" she guessed.

            "My precious, power-hungry babies," the Bothan said, which seemed to be all the confirmation she was going to get.

            "Aren't you worried about them spreading? Might cause problems for the locals."

            "Nah," the human said with a shrug. He combed a hand through his hair, flattening it against his skull again. "Plenty of space traffic and a low helium atmosphere because of some problem during xenoforming – the locals know how to deal with a few stray mynocks." He grinned at her. "Mynock puffing, mostly. And I hear they make good eats."

            "Stop," the Bothan said, and he sounded so sad that Jyn didn't have the heart to tell his friend that he had heard right.

            "You'd better get going," Jyn said. "There's a delivery entrance on the far side of the yard, and they don't check people going out all that closely." It was how she had been leaving the base unseen; getting back _in_ unseen was always more difficult. "Be careful. They'll know that _someone_ was here once his babies are all grown up and ready to destroy military property."

            "Eh, some Imp will probably get the blame," the human said with a wink. "Get told off by his commanding officer for not checking his ship closely enough when he docked. You'll see." He popped his stolen helmet back on, and with a wave and a jaunty step that would probably pass as two troopers freshly relieved from duty, they were gone.

 

            "It _wasn't me_ ," Bodhi said heatedly, tossing his power wrench on the ground beside him with a little more force than was strictly necessary. "I don't care what they say, I _take care of my ship_."

            _Sorry_ , Jyn wanted to say, even though she was certain that she shouldn't be. That she was not supposed to feel sorry for Bodhi's misfortune ( _he brought it upon himself, he brought it upon himself, he joined the Empire of his own free will and he brought it upon himself_ ) had not stopped her from filling a canteen with the good caf from the officer's mess and bringing it down to him, or from sitting with him while he made repairs like some strange form of penance. "Think she'll fly again?"

            From beneath the ship, he snorted. "She'd better. Yung followed up on last night's reaming by telling me this morning, and I quote, _if you can't fix that ship and get me off this dirtball before the evening shift change, I will find a way to launch you into the vacuum of space_ without _having to leave the planet_." He paused. "Which isn't actually very encouraging, since it sort of implies that she's going to flush me into space from the ship if I manage to get her fit enough for takeoff."

            When he groped for the power wrench, she used her foot to scoot it a little closer to him. "They can't spare a repair droid to help you?"

            "That's what they're telling me, at least," Bodhi said. "Mind you, the mynocks did enough damage to the rest of the ships that they _might_ be telling the truth."

            "Sorry."

            "Not your fault." He twisted so that his head was sticking out far enough from under the ship for him to look at her, and the way his eyes were narrowed made Jyn's heart pause in its beating for a brief moment, even if there was no reason for Bodhi to suspect her. " _You_ don't think that I tracked mynocks all over their shipyard, do you?"

            "No," Jyn said. "Of course I don't think it was you."

            "Good," Bodhi grunted, and got back to work, leaving Jyn to wonder why it had mattered what she thought.

 

            "That was dangerous," Galen remarked, when Jyn told him.

            There wasn't a hint of reproach in his voice, but Jyn still felt defensively compelled to say, "If I get the chance, I'm going to do it again. You can't stop me." The last came out sounding more petulant than firm, which she _hated_ , but she lifted her chin and met his gaze, trying to convey that she was serious about this.

            "I don't want to," Galen said, and he sighed and smiled ruefully. "Or, perhaps I do, but I know it's not my decision to make. You're doing good work, Stardust, even if I wish it wasn't you doing it." He tilted his head back, considering. "If it must be you, however, perhaps I can find a way to make the danger safer."

            She figured that nothing would come of it when he spent the next few days hunched over his datapad, scribbling out illegible things and occasionally sending off correspondence adamantly enough that she was worried about him breaking a finger or the datapad – whichever one gave first. She should have known better, though; Galen Erso certainly had a brain large enough to fit more than one thought at a time.

            "I want you to look at these," he said, when she settled herself beside him one night. He pushed a second datapad toward her. She stared at it for a moment, but couldn't think of a reason not to pick it up, except that this felt like a trap. There were two documents already open. One looked to be a military roster. The other was an architectural drawing, simply labeled as _Garrison - Desert_ in a scrawl significantly neater than her father's.

            "What's this?"

            "Unless environmental factors or local resistance necessitate a change, Imperial staffing and facility design tend to be heavily standardized," Galen said, without looking up from his own work. "Shift changes, should you need to lie to a guard about what his predecessor did again. The layouts of the places you're likely go, should you continue to take a more active role in whatever Saw's people have planned. There's very little I can arm you with besides knowledge, but I _can_ give you that."

            Jyn was suddenly and viscerally reminded of the math problems he had set her as a child. Crop yield. Water usage. She supposed that those could have been life or death, too, for anyone whose father wasn't a runaway genius _masquerading_ as a simple farmer, but that didn't keep her from thinking that she'd probably be more attentive to these lessons, and hoping that increased attentiveness was enough to also increase the amount that she retained.

            "There will be a test," Galen added, and even though Jyn's education had been nonstandard and erratic enough for her not to have heard the words from an authority figure before, she felt a chill creep down her spine.

            "Go easy on me?" she tried, and Galen smiled but didn't respond.

            Breaking into an Imperial base blind would have been easier, she decided, but she turned her attention toward the floor plan of _Garrison - Desert_ anyway.

 

            In the first two years of Jyn's cobbled together and mostly improvised career as a spy, she only saw Fulcrum once more, and it was by accident.

            She and Yung had only recently arrived on Hosk Station. For reasons that Jyn couldn't begin to divine, this time Yung had brought with them a pair of black-armored Death Troopers, and having them stepping in time behind her was setting Jyn's nerves on edge. She wouldn't be able to sneak away on this trip, although she hadn't really intended to – the stop at Hosk was one of Yung's devising, not something that Jyn had suggested.

            There were two crewmen and a Flight Sergeant standing at the junction between two hallways. When Yung passed, they snapped to attention so sharply that Jyn thought she could hear muscles pull up and down their spines. It was a sure sign they had been discussing something they shouldn't have been, something they were hoping that a commanding officer hadn't overheard, and _that_ was enough for Jyn to give them a second glance, vaguely hoping that one of them might be willing to strike up a conversation if she were to pass by later, and that perhaps this whole trip wouldn't be a complete loss.

            It wasn't as surprising as it should have been to once again find a familiar face coupled with an unfamiliar uniform (and—Flight Sergeant. Still a step up from gunner, but definitely a step down from the rank he had held with Diplo-Serv). It was still enough of a surprise, the brief collision of these two parts of her life that she _desperately_ needed to keep separate, that she stumbled a little, enough for Yung to slow her pace and glance back, a frown already furrowing her brow.

            He was staring at her, or perhaps at the wall behind her, and while his expression didn't change from the perfectly impassive one that military discipline required, she imagined that, had he been able to speak, it would have been something like _do not screw this up_.

            "Jyn?" Yung said, and Jyn stepped back when Yung reached out to her.

            "It's nothing," she said. "I'm fine." Jyn started forward, and with a shake of her head Yung fell into step beside her.

            She wanted to glance back over her shoulder. She didn't. She was curious, but not curious enough to risk outing them both or – not quite so dire, but still subtly horrifying – risk the possibility of Yung making some wry comment about Jyn liking the fit of an Imperial uniform.

            She wondered if he choked at having to wear that uniform, the same way she choked at having to look at it every day, if his skin burned while he had it on and itched even after he had taken it off.

            She very nearly wondered something else, then, but she stopped and set the thought neatly aside before it could fully form, not really all that different from the other secrets that she held and carried, except that this one was hers, and she aimed to keep it even from herself.

 

            There were small things, true things, which remained true no matter how much else changed. Here were some about Orson Krennic:

            One: Whether she was known or not, standing grimly triumphant at the top of a tower on a world destined to burn or held safe and quiet for years beneath his thumb, he never believed that the daughter of Galen Erso would be his undoing.

            Two: He was always wrong.

            Three: He always caused her some measure of grief, first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm now expecting this to run closer to six chapters as opposed to five. Everything is roughly outlined, but I am real bad at anticipating exactly how long-winded I'm going to be.


	4. Chapter 4

            "Maintenance corridor," Jyn said, pointing to a long, unlabeled rectangle on the datapad's screen before sliding her finger down. "Supply closet. Good place to get uniforms, unless it's armor, in which case that would be," she lifted the finger and set it down on the other side of the map, "armory. Weapons, too, but it's more likely to be heavily guarded; better off finding castoffs in the repair shop that haven't been cycled back into use yet. That's here. Shift changes are based on planetary rotation, which can play havoc on a planet like this, where days are twelve hours longer than a standard rotation and newly reassigned troops need time to acclimate. Exits here, here, and—oh, here, if you don't like your boots too much, I guess."

            "Awfully fastidious, for a spy," Galen said, but he was smiling, so she knew she had done well.

            "I like my boots," Jyn said primly, and looked away when she realized how ridiculous her grin had gotten. This wasn't supposed to be fun.

            "Good," Galen said, and Jyn tried not to glow at the praise. It was possible that years of neglect had bred some very bad habits. It was possible she didn't care.

            He tapped something into his datpad, and her own pinged. "There's the next one," he said, and Jyn tried not to groan.

 

            Jyn popped open the mouse droid, one of six dozen identical mouse droids in the city, and dropped the datacard containing rumors of ships being rerouted into the Albarrio system inside. She was going to have _words_ with Fulcrum, if she ever saw his face again.

 

            "Couldn't I just blow it up?" Jyn asked, intrigued by the possibility.

            "Stardust," Galen said, but lost the rest of whatever he had been planning to say in the laugh he was trying to stifle.

            "No, seriously," Jyn said.

 

            She found him in his lab two nights later, his eyes fixed on the datapad and his expression remote in a way it had not been in some time.

            "They've installed the reactor core," he said, without her having to ask. "Preliminary testing of essential systems has begun."

            "Papa," Jyn said, and didn't know what else _to_ say.

            "All tests are proceeding as expected," Galen said, and no words could have quite described the simple devastation on his face, quiet and soft and incontrovertible. "A glorious day for the Empire."

            She could think of nothing to say, so she said nothing, just sat beside him until the sun rose behind the thick gray blanket of the clouds and bathed the lab in watery light, and hoped that her being there made it better.

 

            The request encrypted into the datacard that Jyn had pulled from a hole hidden beneath the gnarled roots of a jarwal tree was simple. People noticed when uniforms went missing, but they usually blamed it on clerical mistakes and not on deliberate malice.

            Jyn would never know if anyone thought to make the connection between an inventory error and what came after it this time; Yung evacuated her too quickly once the fuel tanks blew.

            "You did a good job keeping your head," Yung said, once they had reached hyperspace, but her tone was all approval, no suspicion.

            "I've seen you in a temper," Jyn said. "What's one more explosion?"

            "I resent that," Yung said, but she smiled when she said it. Jyn resented the smile a little, because this was not friendship, could not have ever been friendship even if Yung had never done a single thing beyond serving the Empire for Jyn to take exception to (and she had, oh she had).

            When Yung went to check on something at the back of the ship and Bodhi took the opportunity to mutter, "Dead to rights," and cast her a lopsided half-smile of acknowledgement, she found that she resented his less, and that worried her more than any explosion had.

 

            "Grand Moff Tarkin is dissatisfied with the recharge time on the primary weapon," Galen told Jyn.

            "That seems reasonable," Jyn said, to hide the way her stomach turned. "What if he needs to destroy _two_ planets? You can't expect the man to wait." It was wrong to joke about this, but she wasn't sure what else she could do. The Death Star wasn't a problem she could _fix_ , and the size of it – literally, figuratively – was something she could barely conceptualize. She studied her father for a moment, and realized something. "You're not upset."

            "It could be an opportunity," he said, voice halting, mind clearly already running at a speed where she couldn't hope to catch him. "I haven't seen the shielding schematics, but if I'm correct in my estimation of how the team working on them would have needed to construct the internal shielding—." He shook his head.

            "You are aware," Jyn said, "that I didn't follow any of that."

            Her father smiled at her, thin but real. "They've kept my team working in more kinds of isolation than one. I've had very little influence on the form or function of the space station itself. The flaw I designed in the reactor module, that instability – one blast would destroy the entire station, but I've had little  chance to ensure that someone can access the reactor and take the shot."

            "They still haven't given you that chance," Jyn said, because she might not have understood much of what her father had said, but she did understand that whatever it was that had displeased Tarkin, it still only touched the reactor.

            "No," Galen agree, and his expression went remote. Silence stretched, not uncomfortable but sustained enough that Jyn began to consider the possibility that her side of the conversation was no longer necessary. "No," Galen said again, abruptly enough that she startled, "they haven't. So I'll just have to make one. I'll have to create a problem too big for them to ignore."

            "And then I find someone to take the shot," Jyn said. There was something like relief in that, or there would have been had there been more of the promise of being able to tell Saw's rebels of the planet killer _soon_.

            Galen didn't answer, and Jyn turned her attention back to her datapad, the floor plan for an Imperial munitions plant shown in pale blue lines across the black of the screen. Hours had passed before Galen said, "Exhaust ports," and picked up his own datapad.

            She figured that he was still deep in his work, so she was surprised when her datpad pinged and a new building replaced the munitions plant on her screen. She studied it for a moment, and then turned a questioning look toward her father.

            "I've been holding on to that one for a while. I think it will provide you with a challenge." He wasn't joking; Jyn watched as more information crawled across her screen: shift changes, key codes, call signals, personnel files, information on the surrounding area and planetary defenses, schedules for shipments of rations, supplies, and _deliveries, misc._ and _deliveries, conf._ , whatever those meant, at least one intriguing document where the first fifteen lines were nothing but _***CAUTION ***_ in bright red – more data that Galen usually provided her when he assigned her an Imperial facility to study.

            "Half of this looks like busy work," Jyn said, as she opened up, of all things, the mess hall's monthly menu.

            "Perhaps," Galen said, "but I would appreciate it if you would study it with the same diligence you've shown for your other projects. I—may not be very available for a while. To you. I'm going to need to lead my team through making some extraordinarily clever but very ill-advised alterations to the reactor core. That will be easier if I insist on the kind of long hours that will please Director Krennic and leave them too tired to realize exactly how ill-advised those alterations are."

            "This is dangerous," Jyn said, and wondered why she had not realized it before. Perhaps she hadn't allowed herself to. "Once the Death Star is destroyed, they'll realize you were responsible. They'd be fools not to."

            Galen reached out for her hand. He was distracted, and he missed, fingers curling against the table for a moment before he realized his mistake and tried again, successfully this time. It would have been funny had she not so desperately needed the reassurance. "Yes," he said, "but I have high hopes that my daughter and her rebellious friends will be able to stage a daring extraction."

            Jyn wrapped her fingers around his, aware that she was holding on too hard. He said it like a joke, but they would. They had better. She would hand Saw's rebels this weapon, this chance to save themselves and countless worlds, but she would want something in return. She would want her father.

 

            The door slid open, and Yung stepped into Jyn's room. Jyn reached for the first thing that came to her hand – a prettily embroidered slipper that rarely saw any use – and threw it at Yung's head. She had never been under the illusion that privacy was assured on Eadu, which was why she never did anything that she shouldn't have been doing even in what were nominally her private quarters, but people were usually a _little_ better about announcing their presence before entering.

            Yung barely seemed to notice, except to mutter, "It would have been fine to give you a blaster, your aim is terrible." Louder, she said, "Get up. Pack a bag. Pack for a long stay, and take anything you'll miss. We need to go."

            "What's happened?"

            "Just do it," Yung said, and stepped out into the hall.

            It was clear that there would be no answers until Jyn did as she said. It was clear that if Jyn wasn't fast enough, Yung would be right back in the room, hurrying her along. It was clear that Jyn had little choice in this, because she had never been given much choice in anything. She packed.

            Clothes. The datapad her father had loaded with information for her, and that she had loaded with a few things of her own. The deck of sabacc cards that Tag had given her. A triple check of her mother's necklace, as though she ever took it off, but there were few enough things that Jyn would miss to make her careful about those few.

            When she stepped into the hall, Yung started walking without so much as looking at Jyn. They were approaching the big cargo bay doors that led to the landing platform before the she spoke. "The Lieutenant Commander has grown impatient. He's sending you off world for a while."

            It took Jyn a moment to realize that Yung was talking about Krennic. Her father called him by name; most of the others used _the Director_ or _Director Krennic_. Yung was the only one who seemed to remember that he had a military rank.

            The man himself was standing on the platform. The sun was out, like Eadu had decided to offer up one of her few clear days in anticipation of his arrival, and Jyn had always hated this planet. A breeze tugged his cloak out behind him, and the face that turned toward her was the same as it had ever been, like the years were as unwilling to touch him as the weather was.

            "Little Jyn," he said, pleasant as always and slick as an oil spill in the rain. "I'm glad to see you looking well." The smile dropped away from his lips, and he motioned her toward the ship behind him – the cargo ship she thought of as Bodhi's, thankfully, not the sharp-edged black monstrosity that she remembered so well from Lah'mu, which was sitting like a carrion bird at the far end of the platform. "We'll find out if being unable to see how well you look serves to properly motivate your father."

            When Jyn didn't immediately move, Krennic's eyes narrowed with obvious displeasure, but to Jyn's surprise, it was Yung who spoke first. "I still think this is a mistake, sir."

            "Your concerns have been noted, Lieutenant," Krennic said, waving a dismissive hand. "Galen has been—distracted, as late. Installation of the reactor core was delayed by months while he made his final calculations. He's moving to make the upgrades required to the weapon, but not fast enough to compensate for the setbacks the project has already suffered. The girl was brought here for a purpose. If she can't fulfill that purpose by staying here as a reminder of what Galen could lose, then she can fulfill it with her absence. A few sleepless nights while he wonders where you've taken her—well, that will just give him more waking hours to complete his work, won't it?"

            Distantly, Jyn wondered if that was why Krennic had agreed to Galen's request that Yung be allowed to take Jyn off world in the first place, all those years ago, if it had served not only to prevent her from endangering herself by trying to explore Eadu's more remote areas, but to remind Galen that one day he might not be informed of her destination, or whether or not she would return.

            "I know that you might be reluctant to be so long away from your work," Krennic said, his voice sliding back into something warmer and more ingratiating, and Jyn remembered that he did not have any particular talent for endearing himself to those under his command, "but I'll assign an interim commander for the laboratory, and there is something I need done for me while you're gone, other than watching her. You're aware that we've been using the Ring of Kafrene as a stopover for pilots who need to refuel on their way to and from Jedha, yes? There's been a _leak_ coming out of Eadu. Information. We cycle out military personnel regularly, but none of them are well enough informed about the work we do here to create this kind of breach. The cargo pilots and their guards are the next most likely culprits. I want you watching them as they come through Kafrene, when they think that they're least likely to be watched."

            Jyn's breath had caught in her throat, but neither of them were looking at her. Neither of them even seemed to remember that she was there.

            "I'm not a part of Imperial Intel," Yung said stiffly, "and I'm not trained in counter-intelligence, sir."

            Krennic shrugged, unconcerned. "No, but you're _loyal_ , and you're honest. I.I. is harder to track; you can never tell who owns them this week. I'd rather not arm my enemies further."

            Yung's lips were pressed into a thin line that made her frustration obvious and did nothing to disprove Krennic's point, especially when she did nothing more than nod and say, "Understood," in spite of her clear reluctance.

            "Good," Krennic said, and flicked an annoyed glance toward Jyn, as though he had suddenly recalled that she was present. "What is she still doing here? Lieutenant, get her on that ship."

            Yung's hand closed around her arm, and Jyn jerked away reflexively. She wasn't sure what to do – throw a fit, like she was eight again, afraid and _furious_? She was both of those things, but mostly she couldn't stop thinking that they _knew_ , they knew that someone had been sneaking information off of Eadu, and eventually someone would realize that she'd had the opportunity, and that would put more than her at risk. "Wait," she said, "you have to let me say goodbye."

            "No," Krennic said. "I don't."

            "Come on, Jyn," Yung said, for all that she made no move to touch Jyn again. "Get on the ship."

            Jyn looked at her, mouth open to form more protests, but Yung's expression was as blank and unmoving as stone; there was no help to be had there. There never had been.

            "Get on the ship," Yung repeated.

            Jyn got on the ship.

            They stood there in silence for a few moments, both of them with spines pressed up against opposite sides of the plane's cargo door, before Yung's limited patience ran out entirely and she went striding back down the ramp. "Where's Rook?" she bellowed. "Someone find me Bodhi Rook!" Jyn almost expected her to follow that up with _bring me his head_ , and wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not when Bodhi came bursting out onto the platform, goggles askew on his head and steps hurried. 

            "Here!" he shouted. "I'm here!"

            _"You'd better be,"_ Yung snapped, which didn't entirely make sense, but that was a triviality that Yung was rarely bothered by when she had decided that someone was not performing their duties according to her own terrifyingly strict standards.

            Galen was a few paces behind Bodhi, jaw set and expression twisted with concern. He reached out like he would catch Bodhi's sleeve, but Bodhi shook him off, already striding toward the ship. Jyn took in the look on Bodhi's face, the way he shook his head and refused to look at Galen, the way he wouldn't make eye contact with Yung as he passed her. She had at first thought that that Galen's concern was for her, but she saw his surprise when he spotted Krennic, and the way it transmuted into fear when he saw her standing there inside the ship. He hadn't known.

            He thought that Bodhi was a good man, perhaps even thought that he could be trusted. She put two and two together, made the short leap to five, and felt her stomach drop.

            "Krennic?" Her father's voice. "What is the meaning of this?"

            "Get her in the air, Rook," Yung said, and Bodhi ducked toward the cockpit. The door began to lift shut, but beyond it Jyn could still see her father.

            He was looking back at her. She couldn't hear what he said next over the sudden growl of the engines, but she thought, from the way his lips moved, that it might have been her name.

 

            They were in hyperspace by the time that Jyn made her way into the cockpit and claimed her customary seat. Bodhi kept his gaze fixed forward, not even so much as glancing her way.

            "What did my father—."

            "Don't," he said.

 

            Any other time, the sight of the Ring of Kafrene growing larger in the ship's viewport might have filled Jyn with a distant sort of awe, raw-edged asteroids pirouetting around each other with their destination like a pale shining jewel at the center, a city in a bottle, carved into and curled between the jagged rocks that the locals had once mined.

            They descended into the city, or perhaps through the city, because the buildings stretched down as well as up, lights gleaming bright and sharp and strange against the darkness of unaltered stone and ancient plastoid. When she had first seen Aldera, Jyn had thought that Alderaan's capital looked like it had grown out of the land around it, cradled lovingly by the snow-capped mountains and cupped against the earth by the soft blue of the sky. She had not then had Kafrene to compare it to, Kafrene, which seemed like it had sprouted from the rock, or like the rock had simple swallowed anything human hands had placed upon it. It had none of Aldera's careful beauty, but it did have a certain ugly, wild abandon to its curving maze of narrow streets and the way that it tried to stretch in all directions at once that almost appealed to Jyn more in her current mood.

            She might have tried to speak to Bodhi again, but Yung hustled her off the ship before she had the chance.

            They were silent as they walked through the coiling, erratic twists of what had to be Kafrene's Imperial headquarters, and this must be what Jyn's papa had meant when he had told her that facilities were less standardized when environmental factors interfered with making them so; it was hard to achieve the perfect, smooth symmetry of the Empire's other bases and outposts when you were building into the rock itself, for all that they had tried, rugged stone spackled over with sleek gray-white duracrete and the edges of the transparisteel windows as sharp and as crisp as a trooper's salute. Yung stopped beside a door, identical to the doors on either side of it, and punched in a code. The pneumatics of the door hissed softly, and it slid open to reveal a room not so very different from the one she had on Eadu, although the childish frills had been dispensed with in favor of a more stark functionality and there was a window, even if all it showed was darkness flecked with dozens of other, nearly identical windows.

            "The door code is 7-1-9-3," Yung said, "but you can talk to facilities management if you want to rekey it. I'll authorize you."

            Jyn glanced at her, startled. Wary. "What?"

            Yung huffed out a breath, short and impatient and _irritated_ , her gaze fixed somewhere to the left of Jyn's new bunk. "It hasn't escaped my notice—." She stopped, huffed again, and seemed to rethink what she had been about to say. "We both know this isn't fair. Your father might not have much love for the Empire, but he's done good work for her, and punishing him isn't going to accomplish anything. Punishing _you_ definitely isn't going to accomplish anything, other than making you even more of a pain to deal with than you already are. I'm pretty sure the Lieutenant Commander is only doing this because someone put a bug under his cap, and if he's going to have to squirm then he's going to make good and sure that everyone else squirms with him." She finally looked at Jyn. "You didn't hear that. You especially didn't hear that from _me_."

            Numbly, Jyn nodded.

            "You didn't have much sense when we first met, but that's to be expected in a child, or so I've heard, having avoided firsthand experience whenever possible. You've got a good head on your shoulders _now_ , and that's what counts. I trust you to use it, so while we're here, you can come and go as you please. No guards. No escort. Log it when you leave and when you return so that I have some idea of where to find you, don't use your real name, and take a comlink with you; those should be precautions enough." Yung tossed something on the bed; Jyn hadn't even realized she was carrying it. The stun baton landed with a thump on top of the blanket. "Take that, too. You never can be too careful."

            It might have been a gift, or a way to placate a troubled conscience, assuming Yung even had a conscience to trouble. It might be a trap, if Yung had arrived sooner than expected at the conclusion that Jyn was as likely the be the guilty party as any cargo pilot or guard, offering Jyn just enough rope to hang herself with. It might be worse than that, if Bodhi Rook took whatever secrets her father had poured out to him and ran his mouth with them. Whatever it was, _thank you_ was not something that Jyn was willing to say, not for a measure of freedom that should have always been hers. Luckily, Yung didn't seem to expect a response, grateful or otherwise.

            "Don't make me regret this," she said, and left.

 

            Jyn found Bodhi on the cargo ship, sitting in the pilot's seat. The interior lights were off, the cockpit illuminated only by the filtered glow of the hangar through the ship's viewport. It was tempting to think that he hadn't moved since she had left him, just shut down the ship and allowed it go quiet and still around him, but his hair was still damp from the refresher and there was a nutrition bar, unwrapped but untouched, on the console in front of him. He looked out through the viewport, but she didn't think he was actually watching the movements of the cargo droids as they lurched past on their heavy, birdlike legs, because his eyes looked tired and sad and a million megalights away. For a moment, Jyn was strongly reminded of her father, in those rare moments when she was sure that the thing occupying his thoughts and abstracting his gaze was not his work, but his memories.

            "Jyn," he said as she settled onto the seat beside him, which was at least better than _don't_.

            "Bodhi," she said, carefully neutral. It wasn't what she wanted to say, but she wasn't sure how to start the conversation she needed to have with him with anything other than _please, please don't get me killed_. She wasn't sure if she started begging that she would stop, and if he did get her killed, that wasn't how she wanted to die.

            "Yung is reassigning me," he said, instead of anything she might have expected. "She said that she doesn't know when we'll be recalled to Eadu, and that leaving the ship grounded and me sitting on my thumbs is a waste of resources. Tomorrow I'll be on my way to Jedha."

            "Sorry," Jyn said, and found that she meant it, because he hated the Jedha run and she remembered that he hated it, and at some point, somehow, without her realizing, that had started to matter.

            She'd never meant to like Bodhi Rook. She sort of wished now that she didn't. Liking him would make this worse, if it went all wrong.

            "Don't be," Bodhi said, and she wondered if she was supposed to read anything into that. "It's home. I never wanted to see it again when I left it. That's not Jedha's fault. Not your fault, either." He fell silent, and stayed that way long enough that Jyn shifted in her seat. He started when she moved, and finally he looked at her. "You're here about Galen. You want to know what he said. You started to ask me, before."

            "I probably already know the answer," Jyn admitted. "I'm more interested in what you intend to do."

            Bodhi sighed, and rested his head back against the seat. "Thing is," he said, "when I said that I never wanted to see Jedha again, I didn't actually mean it. You can hate the place you came from and still want to know that it's there, waiting for you, if you ever decide—if it ever becomes worth going back to."

            There had been unrest on Jedha, rebels pushing back against the Empire every chance they got. Jyn supposed that made it as likely a target for the Empire's new superweapon as any.

            "Galen said I could get right by myself," he said, and the words were stilted but the tone was almost wistful. Jyn held her breath. She knew what anger tasted like on her tongue, clogging the back of her throat. She knew fear, too, and had been carrying a mouthful of it ever since she had seen Bodhi bolt out of the laboratory with her father hot on his heels. Hope was something more foreign to her palette. "He said I could make it right, if I was brave enough to listen to what was in my heart. Do something about it."

            "And?"

            "I know what's in my heart," Bodhi said, and his eyes were still like two open wounds on his face, but he sounded calm. Sure. Peaceful, in a way that very nearly made Jyn envy him. "Now tell me what to do to make it right."

 

            It had been tempting – very tempting – to tell Bodhi that all he needed to do was keep a secret but, as it turned out, there was something that Jyn thought he could do for her, and besides that, she thought he perhaps deserved more than an easy answer.

            "The drop is on Takodana," she said over breakfast the next day (or what passed for day, because _day_ and _night_ were mostly academic distinctions on Kafrene, where the sun didn't rise or set so much as occasionally swing into view). She slipped him the piece of flimsiplast in her hand once she was sure that Yung's attention was elsewhere. "You remember where?"

            "Jyn," he said, "I remember. Just like I remembered last night. And earlier this morning. And five minutes ago."

            She had possibly asked this question more than once.

            She walked him to the hangar, both of them dodging around soldiers and support staff going about their duties, but once they had reached his ship she didn't know what to say. What was the proper farewell for someone who wasn't quite a friend, but who had more of her trust than any other person in the galaxy, save one?

            "You know," he said haltingly, "I wouldn't have told them about you. Even if I hadn't decided that Galen was right, or if I'd known he was right but decided not to do anything about it, I would have kept the secret. You both—you've been good to me." That seemed to Jyn like an overly generous interpretation of her behavior, but she didn't correct him; let him remember her as kinder than she had been. "I wouldn't have betrayed you, not just for the pay or to keep my own neck out of it."

            If that was true, it meant that her father had been right, and that Bodhi Rook was a good man. Possibly it meant that he was one of the best men she had met. Jyn wasn't quite sure how to reconcile that.

            "Stay safe," she said.

 

            There was a scrap of flimsi folded carefully in the pocket of Bodhi Rook's jacket as he flew away from the Ring of Kafrene. It had been sliced from the blank corner of an engineer's notes when the engineer wasn't looking, because of the many things that Jyn had received on Eadu, often the most useful were the ones she stole for herself. It read:

            _have been reassigned to kafrene._

_may be compromised. standby. - lh_

 

            A month passed, and in it, Jyn learned Kafrene. She couldn't learn it the way she had learned Eadu, where every face was a familiar one and every name came easily to her tongue – there were too many Imperials for that, far too many civilians, and beyond too many ships flying in and out of the trading post for any reasonably person to even hope to keep them all straight. In some ways, though, she learned Kafrene better, because she had the freedom to do so: the vendor who grilled muja fruit over the coals on the corner told her about the eggs her wife was brooding at home, and the one in the central marketplace who imported lush shraa silk and scandalously sheer zoosha fabric made something of a game out of trying to find something that would tempt Jyn's eye. The youngest of the Imperial officers seemed charmed by the novelty and implicit mystery of a civilian on the base who had no discernible job or obvious reason for being there and yet was more-or-less given free run of the place. They asked her to join them for drinks and made exhaustive attempts to cultivate her friendship, in a way that no one on Eadu ever had, perhaps because she was so much less obviously a prisoner here. Jyn was torn between avoiding them at all costs and allowing them to think that they had won her over, because in the back of her mind hovered the idea that it would be no bad thing to be surrounded by people who might – might – hesitate to shoot if one day given the order to apprehend her.

            The hand of the Empire was heavy here, but the locals seemed to barely feel it. People could grow accustomed to anything given time, and Kafrene had belonged to the Empire for a _long_ time. There were Stormtroopers on every street, and everyone knew to carry their identichips against the inevitability of one being asked for, but surely that was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. The Empire had cracked down on the big smuggling operations and the pirates – which the locals liked – but the Imperial officers here could be counted on to overlook minor offenses, like a vendor peddling more exotic wares under the table or a merchant "forgetting" to list a few items on their customs manifest or a fence selling a handful small, stolen goods, so long as the bribe offered was reasonable and nothing being done interfered too much with the Bureau of Taxation getting its due, or threatened to interrupt the Empire's stranglehold on this and the surrounding area – which the locals also liked.

            Jyn didn't like it, but she thought she understood. It was easy to just shrug and accept when nothing being done changed a person's way of life, or when the changes were so small and so gradual that they barely seemed to matter at all. Oh, the Empire might press that heavy hand down crushing hard, but that was somewhere _else_ , too many parsecs away to count, not here, never here. Oh, the consequences for disobedience might be steep, but if one never disobeyed, then one never needed to worry about the consequences. The Empire had built its way into the beating heart of Kafrene's people the same way it had built its way into the city's rocky surface: by leaving the outside untouched and presenting the illusion that it had reshaped itself to fit with its surroundings, even as it hollowed out the insides in its own image, allowed the form to remain the same but irreparably altered the substance.

            Some days, when she could escape the clutches of her new Imperial _friends_ and explore the city on her own, Jyn liked Kafrene very much, liked its scattered light and its noise, the way that there were too many people on the narrow, twisting streets, and the way that so many people made it impossible to stand out in the crowd. She liked the way that the cooking smells of two dozen different cultures, not one of them native to this unlikely piece of rock and dursteel floating unmoored through space, mingled in the air and created scents that were new and interesting and sometimes not altogether appealing. She liked the flashes of bright fabric, the tangle of languages, the variety of life forms that either called Kafrene home or were a part of the more transient half of the city's population, staying for a day or a week while they took up an odd job or emptied the holds of their ships of goods. She liked that the streets never really emptied, that in a city where day and night were arbitrary numbers on the chronometer no one really saw the point of keeping normal business hours; the maja vendor would go home to her wife, and within minutes a human woman selling meat-of-indeterminate-origin on a stick would take her place.

            At times, Jyn even _almost_ liked the asteroid's near religious devotion to being apolitical, their cheerful selfishness that often went hand-in-hand with small, unthinking acts of generosity, their commitment to living life as though that was the only achievement worth striving for. Perhaps some other version of herself would have even preferred it, the chance to take the easy way out, maybe not forever but for a day or a week, to for one moment rest and _forget_ and be still – but then Jyn would catch a flash of white armor gleaming dully in the half-light of the marketplace, remember that the outside world still existed, and find Kafrene a little depressing in spite of all the things she liked about it.

            A month nearly to the day since Jyn had arrived on Kafrene, and at the end of a long evening spent chatting up merchant captains at asteroid's main docking bay with the vague notion that it would behoove her to know the names of a few who might look the other way for a stowaway in exchange for a few credits, should the need arise, Jyn found herself once again idly browsing the fabric vendor's wares. Mostly, Jyn kept coming back for the company; her eye for color and clothing hadn't improved with age, but the booth's owner was an inveterate flirt and an occasionally useful gossip who seemed to find Jyn's slight allergy to her pheromones endlessly amusing and more than payment enough for any useful gems of information she did drop.

            "Tanith," she said, because currently Jyn was _Tanith_. "Don't look now."

            There was, of course, no appropriate response to that except to look. Jyn turned, and looked. Up. And then up some more.

            She always forgot how _tall_ the enforcer droids were until one was standing right next to her.

            "Your presence is required," the droid said. "Please follow me."

            "Worst luck," the vendor said, not without sympathy, but also without any indication that she would offer even the slightest aid if the droid's arrival did spell trouble for Jyn.

            "What's this about?" Jyn asked the droid. It might be nothing, or at least nothing more extreme than Yung rethinking her decision to give Jyn a long leash during their time on Kafrene.

            "Your presence is required," the droid repeated, and Jyn frowned up at it.

            "I got that," Jyn said, and this was all wrong. A droid sent from the base would have been authorized to, at the very least, tell her who _required_ her presence. Unless it had been told not to tell her. The possibilities unfolded before Jyn, and she did not like a single one of them. She was being summarily summoned back to the base. She had done very little in the past month that would have aroused suspicion if Yung _was_ having her quietly watched (and the possibility was never far from Jyn's mind), other than talk to a few ship captains and collect gossip that was mostly useless and that she would have been unable to use even if it hadn't been, with no way to access her usual dead drops. It was possible that one of the captains had found her questions suspicious enough to go running to the nearest Imperial. It was possible – although she hated the possibility more than she would have anticipated – that Bodhi had betrayed her, if not intentionally then through some slip-up. She hadn't seen him since he had left, although he had docked briefly in Kafrene for a refuel midway through the month.

            "Did something fry your circuits?" she asked, both to buy time and because that was really the least disturbing of the possibilities that had presented themselves.

            In another creature, she might have called the abortive gesture that the droid made _irritated_ ; as it was, she was inclined to think that its circuits really were fried, or perhaps that some grit had gotten into its joints and it was in need of an oil bath.

            "Your presence is required," it repeated. "Please do not resist. If you resist, I will be forced to use alternative methods to compel your cooperation."

            It had to be her imagination that made her think that it sounded as though it practically _relished_ the thought of using _alternative methods_.

            "I think you'd better go, Tanith," the vendor said.

            "Yes, _thank you_ ," Jyn replied. She looked at the droid. All seven-plus feet of the droid looked back. Jyn did not significantly favor her odds. "Lead the way."

            The droid led, and Jyn followed, dodging around pedestrians who would clear the way for an Imperial enforcer droid but were not similarly motivated to get out of Jyn's path. The droid took a turn, not toward any of the several turbolifts or shuttle sites that would ferry them back up to the base, but down a darkened side street lined with residences. The sounds of the main thoroughfare fell away behind them, and the people passing them by became more scarce and made less eye contact. Jyn very abruptly decided that, while she might not have been enthusiastic about finding out what would lead to her being summoned back to the base, she was even less enthusiastic about any Imperial business that led to her being summoned to a back alley.

            She did not aim to be the kind of spy who was so concerned with maintaining her cover that she lost her life. She might not like her odds in a fight, but there was still time to run. She would have liked a few more opportunities to go to the docking bay and soften the merchants up, as well as the assurance that one of them wasn't the reason she was being collected by a security droid in the first place, but she could take her chances, get off world, plan from there. If she decided instead to stay, if she was overreacting, she could spin some story for Yung about how the droid had been acting erratically and she had been scared. Either option seemed more promising than her current circumstances.

            Most droids used in combat were shock resistant, but a good strike from a stun baton might still scramble it for a few brief seconds, long enough to give her a small head start, possibly even long enough for her to make it back to the main road and get lost in the crowd. Jyn took a deep breath, tried not to think too hard about how she had never actually used a weapon outside of practicing with Yung, and wrapped her fingers around the grip of her baton where it dangled from her belt. She waited for the moment when she could—.

            The arm came out of nowhere.

            No, that wasn't right: the arm came from the droid, and she saw it coming, she just didn't have much chance to get out of its way before she found herself on the ground, staring up at the droid's glowing eyes and the distant jagged dome of rock that served as the city's sky, trying to remember how to breathe.

            _"Kay."_

            "What?" the droid asked, and she had been right before, it hadn't been her imagination, the droid definitely had a _tone_. "She was going to attack me. I had to defend myself."

            "This was not the plan," and she knew that voice, a fact which was confirmed when Fulcrum leaned into her field of vision. She noted that, in spite of the scold implicit in his words, he did not sound particularly dismayed to find her lying on the ground.

            "I altered the plan," the droid said. "The plan needed altering."

            Fulcrum sighed, and held out a hand to help her up. Jyn did not feel significantly motivated to take it, but she did gasp out, "Oh, good," and felt certain that she would actually mean it as soon as she relearned what her lungs felt like.

            Fulcrum didn't respond, but past the flecks of light swimming at the corners of her vision Jyn could see his mouth do something strange and complicated and completely unreadable. She was suddenly, viscerally reminded of the last message she had sent, and she began to wonder if her situation had actually noticeably improved.

            _Oh. Good_ , she thought, and did not particularly mean it at all.

 

            It was strange to see Fulcrum dressed as a civilian. Jyn kept having to double check, as though any moment now she would spot the insignia of the little-known Imperial What's-it Unit embroidered on his shoulder or pinned to the collar of his very normal jacket.

            She had finally allowed him to tow her to her feet, and between glances to make sure that he had not suddenly managed to transmute his clothing into something more deceptively Imperial, she busied herself with fastidiously brushing dirt from her own clothing, mostly because she could feel him growing more and more impatient with every second she delayed. The droid had gone to keep watch at the mouth of the little cul-de-sac they had sequestered themselves in – to keep others from approaching, or to keep her from leaving? Both? – but the way it occasionally swiveled its head in their direction made her think that maybe it was getting impatient too. Good. If she was going to have to wait to feel like she could get a proper breath, then it could wait for her to feel like talking.

            "Hallik," Fulcrum finally said.

            "Sure," Jyn replied, because she had never really believed that he believed that was her name. From the quick, dismissive gesture he made, she thought that she had probably been right but also that he still didn't find her very amusing.

            "I got your message," he said.

            "And you decided to send an Imperial droid to collect me," Jyn said, because she very much felt that this complaint ought to be addressed before their conversation proceeded further, "which seems like it might be the kind of thing that would unnerve a person concerned that her cover has been blown. _Why_ was that the plan?"

            "I asked him the same question," the droid offered. "Albeit for different reasons."

            "Kay-Two is less conspicuous than I am here," Fulcrum offered, which was true enough, with so many Imperials on the ground, but then he followed it up with, "and I thought that you might remember him," which left Jyn scrambling to figure out if there was a diplomatic way to say _I remember him, but I thought he was set dressing for your costume_ or possibly just _they literally all look the same_ , neither of which were flattering enough to be appreciated.

            "You got my message," she said instead.

            "You think you've been compromised."

            _And you ran toward the danger?_ she almost asked, but she knew already that the question was a gross misinterpretation of his likely motive for seeking her out in person. "I overheard two of the officers where I'm stationed speaking," she said, choosing the words carefully, deciding how much of the truth she could skirt around without making everything she told him effectively useless, how much she could say without revealing too much of who she was and where she had come from. "The know that information is being leaked by someone on the base. Right now they suspect the cargo pilots, which is why we're on Kafrene – they refuel here – but I'm one of the only other people who leaves and comes back regularly. If the pilots are cleared, it may not be long before they start looking at me, if they haven't already."

            His face didn't reveal much, but she thought he'd looked interested when she mentioned the cargo pilots, and she wondered if careful hadn't been careful enough. No, there had to be half a dozen planets under Imperial control that used the Ring of Kafrene as a way station; if he was looking for her, that might narrow down his search, but it wouldn't give him any answers that she was unwilling to give herself, especially since Eadu was kept secret.

            "I've been wondering," she said, "if I have you to thank for the fact that they're looking at all."

            To his credit, he didn't get offended, and seemed to give the idea some thought. "I wouldn't rule out a traitor on our side, although the people I've had emptying your dead drops are ones I've vetted myself, after the first few." After he had realized that the information she was giving him was worth something, she thought, and almost wanted to smile. "There's also nothing on anything you've given me that would lead someone back to a single source."

            Galen had scrubbed the data himself. Jyn did allow herself a smile then, a very small one and all that she could manage when his hand was still resting near his hip in the posture that she remembered so well from the last dark alley they had conversed in. "You looked?"

            He met her gaze for a moment, then looked away, toward the mouth of the cul-de-sac as a pair of strangers walked past. "Of course I looked."

            He waited until the couple had passed, hastening their steps after they spotted Kay, before speaking again. "Unless your information is unique enough to have _only_ come from one place, I don't know how they could know to look at you. I don't know how they could have known to look at all."

            The research all originated from Eadu, but there were backups elsewhere; Jyn's father had mentioned that the data was all moved off site eventually, to one of half a dozen archives. Galen had been trying to figure out _which_ one for years. As far as she knew, he had never succeeded. From there it went to munitions plants, to factories, to all the places where those pretty, deadly, imaginary things became a reality. The correspondence might narrow the field, but correspondence by its very nature had two points of origin, sometimes more. The information Jyn collected herself could have come from anyone with reasonably unfettered access to troopers from various points in the galaxy, and that could literally _be_ anyone who served in a place where garrisons were cycled in and out with any regularity. All together, those things might have painted a picture of Eadu, but she couldn't see how – even if one of Fulcrum's people had been trading with both sides against the middle – anyone would have gained possession of all of those things together.

            "No," she said, and for a moment she felt so relieved that she was dizzy with it. "Not only one place."

            He studied her, although she wasn't sure what he could discern in the shadows, always so deep on Kafrene and deeper here, far away from the light and sound of the market. "Is it possible that there's someone else circumventing their security?"

            He was digging, and they both knew that there was no way for her to confirm whether he had other sources on Eadu without her telling him where it was that she hailed from. She didn't think he did; if a cargo pilot or one of the guards who watched over their shipments had turned their coat, her identity would not have remained a mystery – she haunted Eadu's landing platform often enough for all of them to have seen her, and the pilots at least knew who she was.

            "You have to trust me sometime," he said, as if he had sensed the tenor of her thoughts and cajoling in a way she was sure that some of his assets found very convincing, except he had never tried to charm her before.

            "Trust goes both ways," she said, and let her gaze drift toward the hand resting at his hip.

            He flicked a glance down, tracking where her eyes had landed, and his hand dropped away from the blaster, visible below the hem of his bulky civilian coat this time instead of hidden beneath a sleek diplomatic cloak.

            "What would you have done, I wonder," she said, slow and considering, "if it had turned out that I _was_ compromised?"

            "I hadn't decided," he said, and she thought a little better of him when he met her eyes and refused to flinch, for all that she was sure that she shouldn't have. She shouldn't have been disappointed, either. She was used to being disposable, she was just used to being disposable to the Empire. It was her own fault for putting those brave enough to oppose it on a pedestal.

            "I do what I have to do," he said when she didn’t immediately respond, and she thought that there was some warning there that she didn't quite understand, hidden behind the one that she understood very well.

            "It's possible that there's another leak," she said instead of replying. "Even if they're not passing information to you, they might be selling anything they find that's valuable to anyone who will pay for it – it's happened before – or they might be giving it to someone else. There _are_ rebels who answer to someone other than Saw."

            "Yes," he said. "I know."

            "Does that settle it, then?" she asked, already taking a step backward toward the mouth of the cul-de-sac. "Am I not getting shot tonight?"

            He still didn't look like he thought she was amusing. That was a pity; she thought that her ability to joke about her own close brush with Death By Expediency ought to count more strongly in her favor. He did raise a hand to wave the droid out of her path, however. "The information you have is still valuable. You could still help a lot of people." His tone wasn't pleading, but she thought that, had he been a different man, it might have been.

            "I know," she said, "which is why you'll still have it." He was still her only path to the rebellion, and she still knew where she stood. Nothing had changed, really, except that she now knew a little better where _he_ stood.

            She was glad now that she hadn't given him the weapon when she'd had the chance. It was the only chip she might have left to barter, and she knew herself well enough to know that she might want to help, but she wanted her father _more_. Now she knew for certain that loyalty to the cause alone wouldn't buy her the help she needed.

            "Every third day," he said quickly. "Just make sure that you're somewhere public. I'll find you."

            She had reached the street, and was far enough away that she had to turn her back on him, even if she didn't really want to.

            "Liana—" he started.

            "That's not my name," Jyn Erso replied, "but I'll be there."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I remain incredibly bad at judging how much of my outline I can cover in a single chapter. Watch as I turn what was supposed to be one chapter into three! Ta-da!
> 
> 2) Have a chapter early, because I am letting a very nice woman pull bones out of my jaw this weekend and intend to spend the rest of my time off downing painkillers like a champ and whining. The next chapter might be a little late as a result, because weekends tend to be when I get most of my writing done, but we shall see!


	5. Chapter 5

            Jyn never spent more time in the Imperial base than she had to, once she had learned its patterns and its secrets well enough to feel like she could circumvent its security if she needed to (and that part was almost habit now). She didn't actually have to vary her routines greatly to make sure that, three days after the droid had taken her from the marketplace, she was back there again, making herself as obvious as it was possible to be in the crush of organisms browsing the shops and stalls. There was a cloth sack slung over her arm, because a nervously sweating corporal had been bringing her a few credits a week and refusing to explain where they had come from since she had arrived on Kafrene. She suspected Yung, and also suspected the smokescreen of the corporal was meant to provide plausible deniability as to how Jyn had gotten money she wasn't supposed to have. She added most of it to the small but respectable stash she kept hidden in the lining of her jacket for the rainy day that might require a daring escape or a hefty bribe, but some of it she spent – mostly on food, but once on a pair of bantha butter soft leather gloves.

            It had been the first time since her mother had allowed her to choose between the toys sold by their neighbor on Lah'mu that Jyn had been able to pick out something she wanted for herself, something she might be allowed to keep with money she could openly spend. She still did not like to feel gratitude for being granted some measure of the things that had been denied to her by the people who had denied her them, so she gambled with the money she had left and made sure Yung's credits got mixed in with the ones she had won, until she couldn't tell the difference between the credits that she had been given and those she had earned.

            She was squinting at a hairpiece made of night pearls through the window of a shop dealing in imported jewelry, trying to figure out if they were real (unlikely, but possible) and, if they were, the likelihood that they were stolen (high), when someone stepped into her peripheral vision. She flicked a glance at Fulcrum, but didn't immediately lean away from the window.

            "See anything you like?" he asked.

            "No," Jyn said, and slid the bag down her wrist so that she could hand it to him. "I got something for you, though."

            "For me?" he asked, but he was already taking the sack from her as he said it, smoothly, without a hint of hesitation, as though they had always traded information like this, in snips of innocuous conversation that no passerby would give a second thought to instead of in anonymous dead drops scattered across a dozen different systems.

            He opened the bag, and for a moment he looked surprised, perhaps even a little bit pleased. "Does this mean I've been—." One of the muja fruit she had purchased, raw, from her favorite side street vendor, shifted and revealed the datacard tucked beneath it. "Very thoughtful," he said, his expression returning to a more reserved shape.

            "Your favorite," Jyn said blandly. "Did you think I had forgotten?"

            "I don't think you forget much," he replied, and hooked the handles of the sack around his own wrist.

            "Oh, I forget all sorts of things," she said with a shrug. "I'd need a map to navigate my own home if I didn't know it so well." She forced a laugh, and knew that it sounded strained but didn't think that anyone who overheard her would care. "I have to write down the key code to my front door. Bad for security, I know. Anyone could just walk in."

            "Is that an invitation?" he asked, and she didn't have to wonder if his smile was as much of a fraud as her laugh was; he never smiled at her when they were alone, and he had to have noticed the old man who had stopped to browse the jewelry shop window behind him, who was watching them now out of the corner of his eye and grinning a little at the young couple flirting in the marketplace. If only he knew. Then again, better that he didn't. Fulcrum might feel the need to silence him.

            That was probably unjust, but Jyn didn't really care. Fulcrum had been right: she didn't forget much.

            "Not an invitation," she said, "but if you want to come on by, there's nothing stopping you, is there?" She nodded toward the bag, and pretended to shift the subject. "Sorry. I know it's not what you're used to, but I'm a long way from home and I didn't know where to look."

            "I'm not one to turn down a gift," he said.

            "That would be rude, wouldn't it?" Jyn said, "And you've never been one to shoot the messenger."

            It barely made sense in the context of their fake conversation, but she had the perverse desire to see if she could make him flinch, as he hadn't done three nights prior. He didn't, he just met her gaze levelly, and in the end it was Jyn who looked away first.

            They walked away together, but split as soon as the old man who had been watching them so intently was out of sight.

 

            An Imperial droid had spent the better part of the past quarter hour walking steadily in front of Jyn, never so close that anyone would think they were travelling together, but always stopping at the corner long enough before taking a turn that she was in no danger of losing him. Jyn couldn't confirm that this was the droid who had knocked the air out of her lungs the first time she had made contact with Fulcrum on Kafrene – he still looked no different from any of the others she had seen over long years spent almost exclusively on worlds controlled by the Empire – but it seemed possible, it had been three days since her last meeting with Fulcrum, and if she was wrong she would lose nothing more than part of her day.

            He led her down a narrow side street and to a small prefab house that was listing slightly to the side after being used for a number of years longer than the manufacturer had probably recommended, and when he waited for her at the door she knew she had been right. They stepped inside.

            The inside of the house was none-too-clean and contained no furniture other than a cot barely wide enough for a single person. Jyn found herself idly hoping that Fulcrum did not trust her well enough to meet her in whatever place he laid his head at night. "Just you and me today?" she wondered. It didn't really matter; she had very little to pass on, and she doubted that the desire for further intelligence had ever been the sole purpose of these meetings. She hadn't been compromised, but there was still no guarantee that the mole hunt wouldn't lead to her, even if she hadn't been its original target. Fulcrum was keeping an eye on her.

            "He'll be along shortly," the droid said.

            He seemed perfectly content to stand in the corner, his photoreceptors fixed unerringly in her direction, but eventually the silence and the staring got to be too much for Jyn. "I don't believe we were ever properly introduced," she tried, for all that she wasn't certain how interested she was in an introduction. Fulcrum had called him _Kay_ , but that probably wasn't his designation, and it wouldn't have been the first time that someone had nicknamed a droid they had gotten particularly fond of – even Yung had seemed a little glum when the Clone Wars-era medical droid that had served Eadu for decades, affectionately dubbed _Bees_ , had been cycled out in favor of newer model.

            "I try not to become too familiar with Fulcrum's assets," the droid said. "Spying on the Empire is a dangerous occupation. It tends to end poorly."

            "Oh," Jyn said faintly.

            "For them," the droid clarified, as though clarification was necessary. "It really doesn't affect me much."

            "Kay it is, then," Jyn muttered, and settled herself down on the edge of the cot to wait.

 

            Whenever she returned to the base – to sleep, to use the refresher and change her clothes, to continue to reluctantly cultivate her fledgling friendships with the young Imperials, to report to Yung – Jyn made sure to set aside a few minutes of her time to delve into the last set of schematics and data her father had been able to transfer to her datapad, before Krennic had parted them.

            She had been right; at least half of it _was_ busy work. She learned it anyway. She spent hours poring over the same information, until she imagined that she could infiltrate this base blind and in her sleep. Galen wasn't there to test her, so she tested herself, and tried to make it sound less desperate in her head when she thought that he would be proud.

 

            The next time Bodhi had a stopover in Kafrene, Jyn knew about it – she had set up the little-used computer in her room to alert her if he was logged entering the asteroid belt after she had missed him the first time he had travelled through on his way between Jedha and Eadu.

            They didn’t have much time. His scheduled stop was brief, and he kept casting nervous glances at the droids who were topping off his fuel, either because he was worried about what they might overhear or because he didn't trust them to touch his ship; it was difficult to tell with Bodhi, or with any pilot, because Jyn had never known one that didn't have _some_ kind of preoccupation with whatever they had been given to pilot.

            "I delivered the message," Bodhi said.

            "I know." She didn't quite know what to do with her hands. She thought that maybe she should reach for him, pat him on the shoulder, do something to show that she was greeting him as a friend, but she didn't know how, or if she should, or even if that was what they were. She just knew the sudden, nearly overwhelming rush of relief she felt the first moment that she spotted a face that she felt like she could trust, and she thought that she could be grateful to him for that, as she could not be for the little liberties that Yung doled out.

            Maybe he saw her hesitation, or her relief, because he offered her a half smile sharp with understanding and tucked his own hands deep in the pockets of his flight jacket. "I've seen Galen," he said. "He's—fine. I mean, as fine as he ever is. He misses you. I told him where you'd been taken."

            "Thank you," Jyn breathed. It wasn't much, but it was something. It was more than she'd had.

 

            "I'll have the starfire 'skee," Jyn said, leaning across the bar to be heard over the music and the noise of the club behind her, "and he'll take a shot in the dark."

            Fulcrum cast her a look, opaque and unamused. The Nautolan bartender just blinked his large black eyes at her, translucent lids flashing brief and wet across all that inky darkness, and nodded to acknowledge her order.

            "Is that even a real drink?" Fulcrum asked, once the bartender had departed.

            "Arkanian sweet milk and caf," Jyn replied promptly. He did not look like he believed that the drink being real in any way precluded the comment from being a subtle dig at his ethics, which was fair, because it had absolutely been that too.

            "You're not going to let that go, are you?"

            "You haven't given me any reason to," Jyn replied, as they collected their drinks and wove around the edge of the dance floor, past the low stage where a trio of Mon Calamari were performing moves more elaborate than the patrons could ever hope to master (the club was actually called _The Dive_ , and between the Nautolan on the bar and the Mon Calamari on stage, Jyn was of the opinion that someone thought they were far too clever about their visual puns). She recognized the face of an off-duty Stormtrooper and turned her own to avoid being seen as she led Fulcrum past him to one of the private booths in the back, even if the trooper seemed too enthralled by his dance partner's six wandering hands to be much concerned with Jyn. "You said that you wanted me to trust you. If that's true, give me someone worth trusting."

            She wasn't sure why she had said it, or what she wanted him to say in response. She wasn't even sure why it mattered; _trust_ did not actually seem to be required for their little operation to succeed, because she kept giving him information and he kept – presumably – passing that information on to people who could put it to work. Nothing had suffered except for her opinion of him, and she could think of no good reason why Fulcrum, who probably had more pans on the stove than a cooking droid in a Destroyer's galley, would want to spend time reassuring an asset who had already made it clear that she would continue to perform for him regardless of how she felt about him personally. Even if he did make the effort, she wasn't sure that it would matter, because she would know that anything he gave her was just calculated to ensure that, today or at some future date, he got something in return.

            She wasn't sure about any of it, she just knew that the answer he gave would matter.

            The curtain covering the booth's entrance swooshed closed behind him as he took the seat across from her, and the booth's ancient privacy screen coughed to life a moment or two after. He didn't sip from his drink, but he turned it idly between his hands as he considered her. "I am trying," he said eventually, "to figure out where you stand."

            "Where I've always stood," Jyn said. "Against the Empire."

            "Not always," he corrected, because he thought that she had willingly become a part of the Empire still, and Jyn had never bothered to correct him. She thought that whether or not she _ever_ decided to correct him might depend a great deal on whatever he said next. "Who would you consider worth trusting?"

            She smiled, and tried to make the edges of it harder when it came out feeling a little wistful on her lips. "Trying to figure out who you'll be today?" she wondered. He couldn't be a Flight Sergeant or a diplomat to her, but she was certain that he had other costumes that would do.

            His jaw tightened, and she couldn't tell if she had struck a nerve or if he was just irritated that she had called his bluff.  "Cassian."

            "That's a nice name," Jyn said, and it took effort to keep her voice as light and airy as she wanted it to be. "Whose is it?"

            "Mine."

            She believed him. She spent a moment pondering whether she believed him because there was a reason to believe him, or if she believed him because she _wanted_ to believe him.

            It didn't really matter, in the end.

            "Jyn," she said, because she could give him that and it would be like not giving him anything at all; if he had never believed that she was Liana, then he had probably always known that she was Jyn, and _Jyn_ still meant nothing without _Erso_ attached.

            She wasn't sure what to do with the way that he almost smiled at her before stopping himself, like a name that meant nothing meant something after all, like _Jyn_ was another word for _trust_.

            It wasn't.

 

            "Kyber crystals," Cassian said, some weeks later.

            Jyn froze, her hand still wrapped around his wrist, the datacard she had been pressing into his hand still trapped between his palm and the weight of her thumb, his body still a barrier between her and the rest of the marketplace, blocking the entrance to the little alcove where she had towed him for a private moment – although not the kind of private moment that the fabric vendor was clearly thinking of, because Jyn could see her smirking in their direction from around the edge of Cassian's shoulder. That could be a problem in its own right; she really was a gossip.

            "What?" she asked, to buy time.

            "The Empire has been moving large shipments of kyber," Cassian said, his body curved over hers like a question mark. Jyn tried to figure out if it was intimidating because he was aiming to intimidate or because she knew she was about to lie to him. "Do you know anything about them?"

            "My father, he—." Jyn stopped herself, and could not imagine what had compelled her to introduce Galen to a conversation he didn't need to be a part of, even as the most oblique of references. "He said they powered the Jedi's lightsabers. That's all I know." She licked her lips, and knew that he had caught the quick, nervous gesture from the way his eyes tracked it. He palmed the datacard and stepped back, although his gaze never left her.

            "You're a bad liar," he said eventually, and he sounded more frustrated than angry. "You should work on that. You'll get us both caught."

            "I wouldn't keep something from you that you could use," Jyn said, and there was truth in that, even if she hadn't meant there to be. The Death Star's existence was the chip she would bargain for her father's safety, and when she parted with the knowledge it would be only after establishing the clear understanding that she expected something in return, but she doubted that she could have justified holding back had Galen not still been working on a way to disarm the weapon when she had left Eadu, not in the least because Galen would have been the last one to want her to do so. It was one thing to be careful about how she presented the information _when_ she presented it; it would have been another to withhold it longer than was necessary to prove a point, and hazard the death of a world while she dallied.

            It was a flimsy justification at best. There was no guarantee that the Death Star hadn't been completed in her absence, and less of one that Krennic would have recalled her to Eadu the moment that the work was done. She ought to tell the rebels, give them even what little, incomplete data she had, fill in the details once she'd had the chance to talk to her father or work with them to find another source of information. The stakes were too high to keep playing; Jyn was a good enough gambler to know that. She ought to tell him.

            It was on the tip of her tongue.

            She said nothing.

            (She would not kill a world to see her father saved, but she would risk one. It was a small distinction. She could barely see it. She doubted that Cassian would see it at all.)

            "Maybe not such a bad liar after all," Cassian said. He took another step back. "I almost believed that one."

 

             "Found yourself a friend?" the fabric vendor purred when Jyn walked by, and Jyn forced herself to stop, and to smile.

            "Maybe not a friend," she said, "but we're friendly."

            The vendor laughed, low and delighted, and then laughed again when Jyn got a whiff of her pheromones and sneezed. "Not one of those Imperial boys, I hope. Don't get me wrong, the Empire has been good to us out here, and you'd hardly be the first little local girl to get ideas into her head about what one of them looks like out of uniform—."

            "He's not with the Empire," Jyn said, although she knew she should have let the misconception stand. It hardly mattered; the vendor wouldn't have been able to see much beyond the back of Cassian's head and his coat from where her booth was set up, even when he had turned to go; heavy rolls of silk and gauze blocked most of her view of the street.

            "Good," the fabric vendor said. "You seem like a nice kid, Tanith. I don't want to see you running around with anyone dangerous."

            "Nothing dangerous about that one," Jyn said.

            The fabric vendor nodded, reassured. Jyn didn't know what Cassian was talking about. She was clearly an excellent liar.

 

            Jyn was still expected to report back to Yung regularly, and that schedule was as set in stone as the one she shared with Cassian, so she was surprised when she showed up at the small office that the base's commander had graciously granted to the visiting officer from an outpost even more distant from the Empire's center than Kafrene was, which neither of them were technically supposed to acknowledge existed, only just in time to see Yung leaving.

            "Jyn," she said, clearly distracted. "You're here. Was that today?"

            Absentmindedness was so unlike Yung that it put Jyn immediately on edge; she hadn't forgotten that Yung was nominally here to look for a leak, or that her looking too long or too hard might lead her eye to linger on Jyn, even if the original breach in security that had aroused Krennic's suspicions hadn't come from Jyn.

            "Haven't had your caf this morning?" she asked, trying in vain to convince herself that this was nothing, that she couldn't be jumping every time Yung's shadow made an appearance somewhere she didn't expect it to be.

            "Too much caf, if anything," Yung said, and Jyn looked at her more closely. There were bags under Yung's eyes and her uniform was wrinkled, actually wrinkled rather than just somehow giving the impression of it. "Third shift picked someone up by the docks. He didn't have ident, so they brought him back here. Might've come to nothing, but someone thought to run his face through the system. Turns out he's a known associate of Saw Gerrera, and a long way from his home on Jedha for no good reason." There was triumph in her voice, in spite of her obvious weariness, triumph in the edges of her carefully modulated smile. "It might turn out to be a dead end, but maybe not. He could have been meeting someone here, getting them to whisper secrets to him about Eadu."

            "Saw Gerrera?" Jyn asked, her mouth dry. She wasn't sure who this man was or why he had come here, but if he was connected to Saw and on Kafrene—well, chances were good he had been here to whisper to _someone_ , but not anyone from Eadu.

            "I'm surprised you haven't heard the name," Yung said, motioning for Jyn to follow her as she started down the hall. "You spend enough time loitering outside when the cargo pilots are coming in. Gerrera leads a rebel cell. Brutal little group, his Partisans. They've been dug in like sand ticks on Jedha for as long as I can remember."

            Jedha. All this time, and Saw had been on Jedha. Now Jyn knew, years after the information would have done her any good.

            "Even if this doesn't get me any closer to the answer Lieutenant Commander Krennic wants, a line on Gerrera and his people would be no bad thing," Yung continued. She reached out to jostle Jyn's arm with her elbow. "Maybe it will even give me enough pull to have us transferred back to Eadu. I know you'd like that."

            "Of course I'd like that," Jyn said, and hoped that Yung wouldn't notice or object to the way that Jyn was trailing her down the hall, or the way that Jyn stared at the keypad when Yung punched in a code and then swiped her identity tag across the scanner.

            "Officers only past this point," Yung told her, and Jyn muttered some response – she wouldn't be able to remember later what – and turned to backtrack the way they had come down the hall. She turned toward the mess, just in case Yung had paused at the door to watch her departure, but swung right when she got to the next split in the hallway. Maybe Cassian already knew that his contact had been taken or maybe he didn't, but either way, she needed to get word to him.

            Once she had taken a shuttle down to the city, she found her plan at a dead end for one reason: they had never established a way for Jyn to contact Cassian, and it was only two days after their last meeting; he wouldn't be looking for her, and she couldn't wait.

            She could check the house where Kay had led her. She still didn't think he was staying there, but it was worth a try.

            She made it two blocks before a hand closed around the shoulder of her jacket and pulled her into the deep shadows of a side street. All of the side streets on Kafrene had deep shadows. Jyn had yet to decide if that was a point in the city's favor.

            She almost boxed Cassian's ear. Not because she hadn't recognized him. He was familiar enough by now for her to make out the shape of his face even in the imperfect light filtering from the better lit street he had pulled her from. Just—on principle. "We have to stop meeting like this," she said around the pounding of her heart, too on edge for even a minor start to pass without her body thundering out its conviction that now was the time to flee. "We're becoming a cliché."

            "I was hoping you would make your way into the city today," he said, with no sign of having heard her. "There's—."

            "A prisoner," she said. "One of Saw's associates. Here to see you, I imagine, and picked up during a routine identification check a few hours ago."

            "You have to get me in to see him," Cassian said, speaking quickly. His hand tightened on her shoulder, not enough to cause her discomfort but enough that she began to consider shrugging out from under it. When Jyn was not quick enough to speak, he continued. "He's more than an associate. He's a friend of Saw's, and Saw has too few of those to spare one. I'm sure he'd be grateful for the assistance. Tivik wouldn't even have been here if I could have afforded to leave."

            Saw would be grateful, which was exactly what Jyn had wanted in the first place: Saw Gerrera grateful enough for the delivery of the Death Star that he was willing to listen when she told him that Galen Erso was a captive and an ally still, and worth being saved. If he was grateful for something else, if Jyn found some other way to prove that she was worth meeting face-to-face, she wouldn't need to hold that chip in reserve anymore. She could put all her cards on the table.

            If Tivik had come here only because Cassian couldn't leave, and if Cassian was lingering on Kafrene only to keep an eye on Jyn, then she was, in some small part, responsible for Tivik's captivity.

            It was masterfully done. The carrot and the stick. Hope and guilt. The promise of Saw's gratitude, when Cassian had known from the start that Saw Gerrera was her goal, and the threat that whatever was done to this Tivik by the Empire would fall as heavily on Jyn's conscience as it did on anyone else's. _Very_ masterfully done, and Jyn resented it excessively.

            "I would have helped, you know," she said, and it wasn't right to feel betrayed by this, as she had by a blaster in an alley weeks earlier, not when she still had her secrets and was sure that he had a few of his own, and not when loyalty was no longer an expectation she had of their arrangement. "I was planning to help. You know that, right?"

            Of course he didn't.

            "Of course I do," he said. His hand finally dropped from her shoulder, and she almost found it within herself to believe him.

            "Do you have a plan?" Jyn asked.

            "I need to find out where they're keeping him."

            "I know where he is," Jyn said. "I can get you to him. We can get him out." She glanced toward the street he had pulled her from and at the constant ebb and flow of people and voices that formed the trading post's lifeblood, all of them far too close and far too curious to risk a real discussion of breaking into an Imperial base here. "Let's find somewhere to talk. We'll figure it out."

            "We will," he said, and only hesitated a moment over the first word. He touched her elbow to guide her down the street, lighter and more careful than his hand on her shoulder had been, almost solicitous and the closest he would come to the apology that neither of them had expected him to offer.

 

            "Your chances of dying are not nearly as high as I would have anticipated," said K-2SO, who had finally deigned to introduce himself at some point after Jyn had added the locked door Yung had stopped her from entering to the map she had provided Cassian with weeks earlier, but before she had briefly sent him into what seemed to be the droid equivalent of an almighty sulk by insinuating that his knowledge of Imperial security protocols was so outdated that the only troopers who would recognize them were pensioner clones gumming away their final years (it wasn't that bad, and she shouldn't have said it, but they were all on edge). "Perhaps I should do a diagnostic of my internal processes and then run the numbers again."

            "Perhaps we should recognize that the time we have before Lieutenant Yung literally puts the screws to your man is limited," Jyn said pointedly, "and stick with the plan we have."

            K-2SO swiveled his head toward her, twin photoreceptors like pale, eerie stars in the matte black dome of his head, as unnervingly familiar as the face of a security droid ever was. "I hope you know that I did take your attitude into account while analyzing our success rate, and—."

            "My _attitude_?"

            "—the impact on the likely outcome—."

            " _My_ attitude?"

            Cassian sighed.

 

            Uniforms were easy to come by – this had been true in every Imperial facility Jyn had ever set foot in, because the Empire did not like to risk sending its people out to control and conquer in anything less than the crispest gaberwool or the shiniest plastoid. Jyn left two of them sitting at the end of the bench at the table that she piled into with half a dozen of the base's young officers, in a bundle wrapped sloppy and lumpy enough that no one would guess at what was inside.

            Yung turned her nose up at the officers on Kafrene, who kept strictly enough to protocol while on duty or within the walls of the base but tended to be more easy once they stepped outside, as if some of the asteroid's infectious good humor and indifference to good manners had managed to spread to its more impressionable invaders. They lounged. They drank too much, and talked too much to the locals. They went out as soon as their shifts were over, even if they were on first shift, because on Kafrene _after dark_ was always. They wore their uniforms as neat and precise as any other Imperial, but they would shrug out of their jackets and zip down the tops of their boots once imported whiskey or the wink of some three-eyed stranger had made them flushed and happy.

            "I'm surprised you invited us out," said a Second Lieutenant with a truly remarkable mustache that he had spent the last two months coddling along. "Usually we have to beg."

            "Maybe I'm warming up to you," Jyn said, her fingers knuckle deep in the pocket of his discarded uniform jacket. "I think I may have to leave soon, though. I'm not used to drinking this early in the day. It's going straight to my head."

            He laughed as her nails scraped against metal. "Not early for us. It'll be hours until we're through."

            That was good, Jyn noted. By the time that he stumbled back to the base, she would no longer need his identichip, and he would be drunk enough to think that he had dropped it in some dockside tavern when whoever was on gate duty hesitated to let him pass.

            She made her excuses and got up to leave.

            The parcel she had left at the end of the bench was gone.

 

            Ten feet from the turbolift that would take her back to the base, Jyn passed another young Imperial, handsome in his uniform. Jyn kind of missed the days when she had known little enough about him that the uniform had kept her from thinking he was handsome.

            "There's enough of a resemblance that it should pass a quick inspection," she murmured as she handed him her pilfered identichip. "Between the uniform and the droid, they probably won't bother with more than a quick inspection."

            "This isn't my first time breaking in," Cassian murmured back, gloved fingers closing around the chip. "You're sure he has access?"

            "He was on duty when they brought Tivik in. He was talking around it the whole time we were out." She dared a quick glance at K-2SO, standing still and straight like any good security droid, what was left of her abandoned package balanced carefully on his upraised hands. Nothing strange about that; plenty of young officers might use a droid assigned to them as a glorified luggage rack, regardless of whether or not the droid had been designed with that purpose in mind.

            She looked away, and didn't look back as she made her way to the turbolift. She presented her own identichip once she had reached the top. "I'm supposed to report to Lieutenant Yung," she told the guard on duty. "Any idea of where I'd find her?"

            Not everyone knew everyone on a base this size, but Yung could be counted on to be vocal enough to be known; the trooper didn't even hesitate before he said, "Fell over in her bunk around when first shift was getting off. She's got a DND logged, although there are standing orders to ignore that if you cause an emergency." He paused. "Her words, ma'am." Another brief pause. "Are you causing an emergency?"

            Jyn was seized with the sudden, entirely inappropriate urge to laugh. She kept it from her mouth, but it bubbled uncomfortably in her stomach, nervous-giddy and awful. "Not yet," she said, and sauntered past him toward the doors that would take her deeper into the base.

            Yung was out of the way. That didn't mean the way was clear, but it also wasn't Jyn's problem if it wasn't – she had to trust that Cassian knew what he was doing, and could handle any bumps along the way.

            Her job began and ended with _causing an emergency._

            She kept track of time in the brief glances she could catch of the chronometers hanging on the base's walls and in the rhythm of her boots hitting the floor. She didn't know what she was going to do, but she knew what she needed: somewhere close to the door Yung had gone through, somewhere without a lot of people loitering this time of day, somewhere with security protocols loose enough that she could get in and, most importantly, somewhere—flammable.

 

            Less than five minutes later, Jyn was ducking out of the old communications hub, empty since they had relocated those duties to more state-of-the-art accommodations on the other side of the base. There was no real hiding the puff of smoke or the acrid smell of an electrical fire that followed her out, but everyone seemed far too distracted by the blaring klaxons and flashing lights that warned of an environmental hazard to pay much attention to her.

            She didn't linger to see if her luck would hold, or to check the crowd to see if she could spot an officer, an enforcer droid, and someone who was most certainly not an escaped Imperial prisoner taking advantage of the same chaos she was.

 

            "You live," K-2SO said when Jyn joined them at the rendezvous point, a sliver of space too narrow to properly be called an alley, wedged between an empty warehouse and an occupied one not far from the city's main docking bay.

            "To disappoint, judging from your tone," Jyn replied, but she grinned at him; she couldn't seem to help herself, her earlier giddy nerves finally escaping and transmuting into equally giddy, equally inappropriate joy.

            Small victories. Jyn counted every one.

            "We're not in the clear yet," Cassian warned, but his caution was nearly drowned out by the man standing next to him.

            "Who's _this_?"

            He did not look like what Jyn would have imagined of a fellow spy, or of a personal friend of Saw Gerrera's: round cheeks covered in several weeks worth of beard and the pale and sweating demeanor of a man who might relinquish all of his dignity and possibly the contents of his bowels if someone made too loud of a noise around him.

            "Someone whose face you'll forget after tonight," Cassian said sharply, and Jyn cast him a brief, startled look. "You understand?"

            "You're understood," the man grumbled, shoulders hunching. The Stormtrooper armor they had used to smuggle him out lay discarded on the ground behind him, and Jyn couldn't really blame him. She had lived almost all her life in Imperial custody, and she wouldn't have wanted to wear their uniform for a minute longer than necessity dictated; he'd only had a handful of hours, but she imagined that the Empire had used much less gentle hands with him than they had with her. "What's next? The others probably left when I got scooped up. I hope you've got some way of getting me off this rock, or that rescue is going to have been a whole lot of wasted effort."

            "I do," Jyn said. She looked at Cassian. "Just us, I think. She doesn't know you and you're still dressed the part."

            He hesitated. Tivik shifted in place, nervous or impatient or both.

            "Trust goes both ways," Jyn reminded Cassian, and it wasn't just about trusting her intentions, it was also about trusting her to do the job that he had recruited her to do, and to do it smart.

            After a moment, and without breaking eye contact, Cassian nodded. "I'll see you in three days. Lie low in the meantime. We caused a commotion at the base."

            "She caused an _explosion_ at the base," K-2SO offered helpfully. Jyn was almost certain that his complaint was not that she had been allowed to start a fire, but that he hadn't been.

            "Can we go?" Tivik asked, and since he very much sounded like he was intending to _go_ whether or not she answered in the affirmative, Jyn returned to the mouth of the alley and checked to make sure the coast was clear before motioning for him to join her.

            They stepped out onto the street. Jyn pulled her scarf over her hair and Tivik kept his chin low and his collar up, but whatever was happening at the base, whether Tivik's disappearance had yet been discovered or not, it seemed that no word had passed yet to this distant edge of the city, because the number of Stormtroopers they passed was no higher than it would have been on any other day and none of them seemed any more motivated than they might usually be to stop a pair of people going about their business. There was the possibility of a random identification check, the same trap that had caught Tivik the first time, but—well, there was no getting around the fact that an escaped Imperial prisoner didn't have an identichip, or at least not one he could use, so they would just have to hope that no one stopped them.

            No one did.

            If the rest of Kafrene was crowded, the primary docking bay was more so, because trade was how Kafrene scratched out an existence in spite of its distance and its lack of any resources that could be called its own. She reached out to touch Tivik's arm, to guide him in the direction that she wanted to go, but he hissed and pulled away. "Careful with the goods. The Imps weren't exactly giving me tender kisses."

            "Broken?" Jyn asked.

            "I'll find out once I'm on a ship and on my way," he said.

            The merchant captain that Jyn led him to was one of those that Jyn had spent time cultivating – a tall, broad-shouldered woman of middle years who had been a long shot when Jyn had been hunting for an escape route for herself, because most of the planets on her itinerary were Empire-controlled, but had also been one of Jyn's favorites, because when Jyn had edged around the question of whether she could be convinced to expand her cargo list to include people, she had cast Jyn a narrow, sloe-eyed look and said, "I don't deal in flesh."

            She wasn't a slaver, but Jyn was fairly certain that she was one of the few rare, actual smugglers who still dared to dock in Kafrene, and that was another point in her favor; Jyn did not need to get tripped up by someone being a little too precious about Galactic law, or hesitating over the fact that this was one bit of undeclared cargo they would not be able to bribe the customs officials of the Ring to overlook.

            "I have a friend who needs passage," Jyn told her breathlessly when they had reached the ship and found her captain lounging nearby, smoking a cigarra and watching as one of her men operated a Servo-Lifter to move heavy crates from the dock up the ramp of the ship. "I thought you might be able to help. He'll barely take up any room at all, I promise. Just tuck him into some quiet, out-of-the-way corner, and forget he even exists."

            "Even passengers who don't take up much space can be trouble for someone," the captain said. She sent a quick, assessing look at Tivik but did not otherwise acknowledge his presence, and this was the strange kindness of Kafrene, because she would not take Tivik if she decided doing so was more trouble than it was worth, even if her refusal meant his death, but if someone asked her later she would also very truthfully say that she had never spoken to a man matching his description. "Where would I be taking your friend?"

            Jyn glanced at Tivik. "Jedha," he said.

            "Jedha is a warzone," the captain said mildly, but she tilted her head at a thoughtful angle and she didn't say _no_ , so there was still room to negotiate. "It's out of my way, too."

            "Not by much," Jyn said. "A standard day, maybe two. You might even find that it's a good place to offload some of your cargo. Even people in a warzone need supplies."

            "I might have to steer clear of Kafrene for a while, though," the captain said, and she took a puff at her cigarra. "You understand, taking on a passenger can be bad for business. Attracts the wrong sort of attention, if someone sees you doing it. I get half of my goods here, and sell the other half. Me and my crew, we'd have to be compensated for the time and expense of finding new places to buy and sell for a while."

            "That seems reasonable," Jyn said.

            The price named was not particularly reasonable. Jyn countered it.

            "You're asking me to fly into danger," the captain said, "Don't insult me by asking me to fly into danger for a pittance." She smiled as she said it, like she wanted Jyn to know that she wasn't actually offended, but she also smiled like a woman who knew that she had already won.

            Jyn snuck a glance at Tivik, but even before she saw the scowl twisting his mouth she knew that she would find no help there. They would have stripped him of weapons and credits and anything else potentially useful when they had taken him. She should have thought to ask Cassian, although perhaps even that wouldn't have helped – not much room for loose credit chips or coins in tailored Imperial wool, and Jyn wouldn't have offered nor the captain accepted something that would leave even a carefully hidden trail, like the transfer of funds from one account to another.

            Jyn had money, though. Jyn had a lot of money, carefully horded and hidden and gambled for over the years, tucked into the lining of the coat she had inherited from Tag like a different kind of armor, the kind of armor that might purchase her an escape or someone's favor and keep her on her feet and as free as she had ever been just that little while longer.

            _"If you want something from someone, push them as hard as you can – but know when to stop pushing, at least if what you want from them isn't something you can afford to walk away from,"_ Lyra Erso had said, and Jyn felt certain that Lyra had never foreseen a future for Jyn where the thing being bartered for was someone else's life, and where the price Jyn might pay if things went wrong was her own.

            (Lyra had foreseen it. Lyra had spent years on the run by the time she had died, constantly looking over her shoulder, and late at night while her husband spun out worlds and wonders in his head, Lyra had envisioned every terrible future that her child might have.)

            "Here," Jyn said, and shrugged out of her jacket before regret could nip too hard at her heels. "This should cover it."

            The captain gave the coat a good shake when she took it. Jyn had chosen her hiding spot too well for it jingle, but the jacket was a good deal heavier than an average civilian flight jacket, even such a large one. "I think I'll just step onto the ship for a moment and take a look at this, shall I?" She tossed her cigarra on the ground and snubbed it out under the toe of her boot. "Wait here. If I like what I see, we can do business."

            "Think she's raising the Imperials on her comlink now?" Tivik asked once she had gone, with the uneasy resignation of a man who was in no way equipped to face the business end of a blaster with the grim dignity of a martyr, but who was also aware that running would do very little good.

            "No," Jyn said. She offered no further reassurance, but that must have been reassurance enough, because some of the fear eased out of his shoulders and he leaned back into the edge of a nearby crate to wait.

            "I suppose I owe you," he said, in what Jyn might have called the most grudging show of gratitude that she had ever been privy to, except that she was fairly sure she had rivaled it with some of her own over the years. "Don't know why you did it. Not much I could've blabbed about, and even if there was, there are better ways of solving that problem." He used his good hand to form a pretend blaster pistol and shoot it off at nothing.

            Jyn might have protested, but suddenly she remembered Cassian saying _you have to get me in to see him_ ; there had been no mention of getting Tivik _out_ until she had assumed that was the goal. She wondered.

             They had worked separately in the base; she had never come near wherever Tivik had been held. It would have been a simple thing, a very simple thing, for Cassian to leave a dead man behind instead of bringing her a living one, and to claim that it had been mischance and a Stormtrooper's weapon that had made it so.

            Maybe Cassian hadn't intended there to be a rescue. Maybe it didn't matter, if all he had required to be convinced otherwise was one small push and a plan.

            "That's about what I thought," Tivik said. "Willix or Joreth or whatever he's calling himself these days wouldn't be scooping me out of an Imperial holding cell without a reason. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing but respect for the man. He would lie down and die for the cause if someone convinced him there was a battle to be won by lying down and dying, but he's a cold one. Not above insisting someone else do their duty and lie down and die, if you catch my meaning. I don't know why he needs anyone watching Saw – they're like two Antarian peas in a pod. If he thought really hard about what he would do in any situation, he'd probably have a pretty good idea of what the old man is getting up to."

            There was a buzzing sort of numbness in Jyn's fingers, like the first rush of adrenaline when she knew that something was about to go wrong. "Oh?" she asked, mostly to keep him talking, because perhaps Cassian had been right to worry about Tivik – it took very little to get him talking even about the things that his allies would probably rather he keep secret. Right now, that worked for her. She wanted to hear what he had to say.

            He snorted. "Well, maybe not quite Antarian peas. Saw isn't much for subtlety, these days, and our mutual friend is about as subtle as they come."

            "Doesn't use spies much, I take it?" Jyn was sure that her tongue was taking commands from something other than her brain, because it kept producing comfortably casual sentences while her mind alternated between trying to rush ahead and trying to fall back, to unravel where this conversation was going (had gone) and to keep from seeing the implications of what Tivik was telling her all at the same time.

            He laughed and then winced, shifting so that his arm rested more on the crate and less against the curve of his body. By the time he was finished, he was paler than ever before and no longer laughing. "A few people who will slip him rumors in the marketplace, and a bevy of old friends and admirers who bring him news from distant worlds, but nothing like you or me, no." He glanced at her. "Well, nothing like you. Me, I just slip the occasional word to the Alliance to keep them from getting so twitchy about Saw that they send someone to check up on him. I know how that one ends: Saw shoots an Alliance spy for sniffing around where they oughtn't be sniffing, the Alliance gets her hackles up because he shot one of theirs, and suddenly we're all pointing blasters at each other instead of at the Empire. That's trouble that Saw and Jedha don't need. There's enough trouble in the holy city as it is." He shrugged his good shoulder. "And, I mean, maybe I also occasionally tip the rebellion something I overhear on Jedha, if I think that it's something that they might do a better job of handling than Saw." He glanced at her quickly. "Not that I'm saying a bad word against Saw. I know how the Alliance feels about his methods, but he's a good man. Brave, determined. Like I said, peas in a pod."

            Tivik was not a brave man, but Jyn thought he might be the kind of man who admired bravery in others – perhaps a little too much. "That's what my papa has always said about him. That he's a good man."

            "So our mutual friend isn't our only mutual friend?" Tivik asked, and flashed her a brief, strained grin that edged dangerously close to being a grimace when he accidentally jostled his arm again, crooked teeth barred against his dark beard. "That's the happy sort of chance." He considered her a moment, and then offered another one-shouldered shrug. "If you ever find yourself on Jedha, look me up. I'll make sure you've got a meal in your belly, at least, and my sister will find you a bed, if she ever forgives you for sending me back to her alive." He offered her another weak grin and wiped the edge of his sleeve against his forehead. "Anything you want me to tell Saw, assuming he doesn't think that I betrayed him to the Empire while in custody and shoot me on sight?"

            There was something reckless in the way her blood pounded against the thin skin of her wrists, and something clawing at her stomach too cold to be anger. "Tell him that the daughter of Galen Erso saved your life," she said. "Tell him that you think you might see me on Jedha, someday."

            Maybe, maybe not, but a good spy always had an exit strategy. Jyn had more exits she needed to plan for than her own, and no trust to spare for men who lied to her.

 

            "Where have you _been_?" Yung snapped when Jyn returned to the base, looming out of the space behind the guard checking Jyn's identification at the entrance and making both him and Jyn jump.

            "Out," Jyn said, and carefully pretended not to notice that there were three times as many guards watching this entrance as there usually were.

            Yung's mouth pursed with displeasure. "There's been an incident. You were logged entering the base two hours ago, but there's no log of you leaving."

            "Maybe the guards were too busy dealing with the _incident_ to log me," Jyn said with a shrug, and she ignored the faintly indignant huff that came from beneath the armor of the man still holding her identichip. She reached out to snag it back from between his unresisting fingers. "What happened?" she asked, as she stepped past the gate to join Yung.

            Yung studied her with narrowed eyes, and that study stretched long and silent enough to make Jyn want to twitch. "Remember the rules," she said, finally. "I'm not above confining you to your room again if I think you can't be trusted to make sure that you get logged when you leave, no matter how _busy_ they are and how impatient _you_ are." She reached out to catch Jyn's elbow. "Come on. I'll fill you in over a meal. I haven't eaten since yesterday, and the commander is worried it's making me short-tempered."

            "Did you try telling him that you're always short-tempered?" Jyn asked.

            "I tried," Yung said. Her nostrils flared, and she paused for a second. It was such a small thing. It did not seem like a warning.

            (It was. Jyn had spent most of the two hours since she had left the base in Tag's flight jacket, several pounds lighter now and with its worn lining shredded neatly into strips, and she could no longer smell the traces of smoke that clung to it, the acrid tang of singed plasto and burning electrical components. That didn't mean that no one else could.)

 

            Bodhi arrived on Kafrene the next day, with six days of leave to his name and his quarterly pay sitting pretty in his account. No one was surprised when he barely waited for his boots to touch the ground before announcing that he was taking Jyn out for a drink, and that made it as good an excuse for private conversation as any.

            She took him to the same bar where she had met Cassian, mostly because the privacy screens on their booths might have been ancient, but they were still kept in good working order, and that made them better than similar devices in similarly dark side street bars scattered throughout the city.

            "Nothing he said _sounds_ wrong," Bodhi said, after she had more-or-less relayed her conversation with Tivik to him. "Mind you, Saw doesn't exactly share the inner workings of his Partisans with the locals. Some of them don't like him much, seeing as he has this tendency to blow up the streets they live on." He shrugged. "Some of them like him more than they should. Jedha—it's not like Kafrene. Some of the people there might tolerate the Empire because they have to, but they don't love it." He smiled, sharp and rueful and unkind, but only to himself. "Of course, that doesn't keep a few of the local boys from signing up for flight training if it means a full stomach and a roof to sleep under, and Saw doesn't exactly spend time talking to Imperial cargo pilots, either."

            "Really?" Jyn asked, and lifted her chin. "I've found that they're excellent people to talk to." She didn't entirely mean it, for all that it had sometimes been true, but it felt worth saying to see some of the edges fall away from Bodhi's smile.

            "I have something," he said. "From your father. He said to give it to you in private, though, and—."

            "This isn't private enough," Jyn said, and nodded even though her fingers twitched with want. "Yung's been hovering a little more than usual and everyone's still edgy at the base, but you're here for six days, right? We have the time."

            (They didn't.)

 

            It was three days after they had rescued Tivik, and Jyn had an appointment to keep.

            She was browsing through the vegetables at a stand, squeezing them for ripeness even if she had no idea how she was supposed to tell by squeezing something if it was ripe – other than a few foggy memories of her papa trying to show her how to use the nanowave stove and her mother teaching her which roots and plants were safe to dig out and eat, Jyn had never really learned how to cook – when someone stopped beside her, bought a bag of tangaroots from the vendor, and murmured, "The same place we met that first night on Kafrene. Leave after me."

            She waited until he had left, and then waited not much longer than that to follow him, too impatient to care much about being incautious. The marketplace, the streets that it spilled out onto as though commerce was something that could grow and spread like a vine, they were familiar to her now, and she only took one wrong turn before she recognized the street that K-2SO had once led her down.

            K-2SO was nowhere to be seen, this time. There was just Cassian, the bag that he had tucked the tangaroots into lying at his feet, his hands tucked into his coat and his shoulders as relaxed as they ever were, like this was any other meeting where she offered him either information or apologies. "Are you alright?" he asked, once she had come closer. "There's been no trouble for you at the base?"

            "You lied to me," Jyn said.

            It was hard to read surprise on a face that could go shuttered and secretive in the space between one breath and the next, but she thought that maybe it could be read in his hesitation. "You'll have to be more specific," he said.

            "You've done it that often?" she asked.

            He spread his hands wide, like a friend. "Jyn, if you're accusing me of something—."

            "You lied to me," she said, and stepped closer to him. He swayed back for a moment, like he was thinking of stepping away, but in the end he refused to cede ground to her, feet remaining firmly planted. "You've been lying to me for years. You told me that you worked for Saw Gerrera. You told me that any information I gave you would be passed to him, because you knew my father had told me about him – you knew I trusted him. So you _lied_."

            "I never actually told you any of that," Cassian said, and that drew her up short, even if only briefly. "I told you that we work for the same cause. We do, even if Saw parted ways with the rest of the rebellion years ago. I told you that I could make sure that the right people saw your information, and I _did_."

            He was right. He had never directly told her anything, he had just cleared enough space around the truth for her to lie to herself. She felt the hideous urge to laugh, and wondered a little why he couldn't see that knowing he had gotten her to do most of his work for him was almost worse.

            "You can't talk your way around this," she said.

            "I don't have to," he said. "You had information I needed. You would have given it to Saw. You wouldn't have given it to me. I did what I needed to do."

            _I do what I have to do_ , he had told her once, and he had said it like a warning but she hadn't listened.

            "Even when you know it's wrong?" she asked.

            "I'm not the only one who's been lying," he snapped, and she could see the moment when his calm cracked, and was perversely glad for it. "The kyber crystals, Jyn. You say you stand against the Empire, but that doesn't mean you're standing with us. You're keeping too many secrets for that. You're playing your own game. And you wonder why I lied to you? This isn't a cause for you, it's a hobby, and not all of us have that luxury."

            "You don't know what I have riding on that game," Jyn said. "You don't know what I could lose."

            "You've never told me."

            "You _used_ me."

            They were too close, spitting words into each other's space and each other's air, and far more focused on one another than two spies in enemy territory ever ought to have been, which was, perhaps, why neither of them heard the Stormtroopers coming.

            "What's all this?" someone asked from behind Jyn, and she knew the underwater crackle that came with the comlink in a Stormtrooper's helmet, knew it as well as her own voice, and saw that Cassian did too from the way that he froze, face so close to hers that she probably could have counted his lashes if she had tried. "Come on. Let's see some scandocs."

            Of the two of them, Cassian recovered more quickly, and Jyn was glad that her back was to the troopers – she couldn't have said what her face looked like in that moment, but she knew it probably didn't look as good as his, the way that he could turn smiles and charm on like a glow-lamp.

            "Yes, of course," he said, stepping away from her and toward his bag. "Just—my gloves."

            The blaster fire was fast, heat and a whisper of electric sound, and expected.

            "It's time for us to go," Cassian said, but Jyn could already hear pounding feet from the street behind her, commotion, the distant buzz of comlinks in helmets, too far away for her to hear the words being spoken – but not for long.

            Dead Stormtroopers in an alley would always cause a commotion, but dead Stormtroopers in an alley three days after a prisoner had been taken from the local base would cause a lockdown: roads condoned off, ships grounded, patrols on every street. Jyn knew the Empire, and she knew what the response would be to two such dire breaches in security, one immediately after the other. Kafrene was small enough that the Empire's control would be complete; no one would leave Kafrene, and they would look in every docked ship and every corner of the city until they found out who was responsible.

            Unless they were given a reason to look no further that this dead end alley.

            Cassian's eyes were fixed on the rooftops, and had been for long enough (seconds, but seconds that both of them knew couldn't be easily spared) for her to know that he thought that was their way out. She wondered if Cassian had ever been trapped, the kind of trapped where there was no escape to be had. She didn't think so. Jyn, on the other hand, had spent most of her life there. She knew what a room looked like when there were no windows and no doors that opened. She already knew that there was no way out, and no time to find one. Not for two people, at least.

            "Cassian," she said.

            "Come on—."

            "Cassian," she repeated. "No. You need to listen to me."

            She'd spent so much time agonizing over this one decision, balancing the cost and the risk and what deciding might win her. She had never expected to find it so easy. It wasn't, not entirely. She was scared. She was so scared, but she knew what she needed to do.

            _"Trust the Force,"_ Lyra had said. It was not comforting, because Lyra had said that and her trust had not protected her in the slightest. Perhaps Jyn didn't think of it now because the memory provided comfort, but because drawing the parallel was unavoidable.

            She could see the impatience written large on his face, but he stilled when she grabbed at the lapel of his jacket, gaze dragging away from the rooftops above them to land on her face. She walked him back, deeper into the cul-de-sac, buying them the few additional seconds she would need.

            "You asked me about kyber crystals. There's a weapon," she said, "a planet killer."

            If she'd had his attention before, she had all of it now. "A planet killer."

            "They call it the Death Star," Jyn said. "I know because my father helped build it. His name is Galen Erso, and he's a good man." There was some satisfaction in telling him that, even here, even now, when she'd wanted to tell him for—years. She'd waited years. "The Empire killed my mother. My father is her revenge. He's built a flaw into the Death Star's reactor core. A way to destroy it."

            "How?"

            "I don't know," Jyn said. "They sent me away before my father had worked it all out. You don't need me. You need him. Find Bodhi Rook. He's an Imperial cargo pilot, and he's on leave here for the next few days. Tell him that I sent you. Tell him—tell him that if he wants to make it right, this is what he needs to do. He needs to take you to my father, and you need to get my father out, because he can tell you how to stop this before it even begins."

            It was perfect, in its way. Jyn got almost everything she wanted: her father safe, Bodhi as safe as she could make him, the rebellion, even if it was not the one led by Saw Gerrera, armed to strike a blow that would leave the Empire reeling and save countless lives. She could wish that the price for her wasn't going to be so high, but Galen knew how to stop the Empire, Cassian knew the rebellion, and Bodhi knew how to bring one to the other – there was only one piece that, if removed, did not result in the plan falling apart, and that was her.

            She was disposable. She always had been, first to the Empire, and then to the rebellion.

            "Where will you be?" Cassian asked.

            "Buying you time," Jyn said, and she wrapped the fingers of her free hand around the blaster that he still held in his. "You need to go."

            She saw the moment when he hesitated before loosening his grip, and knew that it was also the moment when he considered using the blaster to ensure her silence – considered the possibility, and then discarded it almost immediately, relinquishing his weapon to her instead, and it hurt that it still mattered, that she cared whether or not _he_ thought she was disposable. She supposed that she must have trusted him, just a little and in spite of her protests. If she hadn't, the things he had done would have stopped feeling like betrayals, and she wouldn't—.

            "Stay safe," she said, and rose up on her toes to kiss him, brief and hard.

            It wasn't a very good kiss, just the quick, blunt meeting of mouths with her teeth pressed too hard against her bottom lip, her balance off even though she still had her grip on his jacket to steady herself with. She didn't know what to make of the look on his face when she stepped back. She had never been any good at reading him. She didn't know why she had done it. Maybe she had just wanted to know what he tasted like before facing the inevitable.

            "Go."

            "We can still—."

            They couldn't, and she knew that he knew that was well as she did, but it mattered that he wanted it to be true. "Trust me. Go."

            She turned her back on him, and counted the seconds before she heard the clang of boots meeting metal. Jyn almost smiled.

            Small victories. If everything went well, the victory wouldn't remain a small one, but Jyn wouldn't be around to see it.

            When the Stormtroopers rounded the corner, they found only Jyn, a blaster that she didn't know how to use in her hand and two white-armored figures unmoving by her feet. She stared at them, at the sea of blaster rifles and the men who barely looked like men behind them, at the familiar square shoulders of an officer's gaberwool coat in their midst, and then she lifted her chin, dropped her weapon, and raised her hands.

            "I surrender," she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, a wild ship appears.


	6. Chapter 6

            The binders dug into the small jutting bones of Jyn's wrists, and that little, sharp pain was almost a blessing. It kept her in her skin, in the moment, when she felt like otherwise she might fly to pieces.

            When she was too slow to stand and exit the shuttle, one of the Stormtroopers nudged her with the muzzle of his rifle, and the way her rib throbbed when he pulled it away was another little pain. This one she ignored. There would undoubtedly be more pain in her future, unless she could convince them that she knew nothing of value, and that the preliminaries could be skipped in favor of a rush toward the inevitable finish. She should have used the blaster while she still had it rather than surrender, forced them to open fire. Back in the alley, she had known what she needed to do and been resigned to the consequences. It was harder now, being forced to walk toward and wait for her own death.

            Her father's position would not save her, not this time. If he hadn't yet finished his modifications to the weapon, they were probably at the point where it would be obvious even to Krennic that the rest of Galen's team could finish the work without him. If they couldn't, the Death Star had been operational for months, even if it wasn't quite to the Grand Moff's liking – they would still have their planet killer. No, they wouldn't spare her to avoid her father's displeasure.

            She'd always suspected that Krennic would kill her when the work was done, whether she behaved herself or not. He had never liked her. If that was the case, maybe this would have always been her end. Maybe she'd been walking toward it since she was eight, waiting for it from the moment that Krennic had placed a booted foot on the rich soil of Lah'mu. If that was true, maybe it was better this way. At least she had done something.

            Jyn took a shaky breath.

            Yung had not spoken to Jyn during the long walk through the streets of Kafrene, but she had comlinked ahead to the base, and their squad of Stormtroopers fell away as they passed the entrance, only to be replaced by the two Death Troopers who had travelled with them from Eadu to Kafrene. One dropped into step next to Jyn, bracketing her between his bulk and Yung's silent fury. The other flanked Yung's other side. There was a ship already waiting for them.

            Bodhi's ship. She greeted the sight with a mixture of trepidation and relief. They'd have no chance to talk. She couldn't risk giving him away. If he was their ride out of here – and that seemed likely, since he was already cleared for Eadu and Yung was not the sort to recognized _I'm on leave_ as an adequate excuse for being off duty – then he would be that much harder for Cassian to find. In spite of all that, she was selfishly glad. She thought it might be—nice, to know that not everyone around her meant her ill, even if there was nothing he could do to help her, and even if she knew it was better that he not do anything.

            A bag she recognized as her own was on the floor at the top of the cargo shuttle's ramp, and it had clearly been rifled through. That didn't worry her. There were things that she had valued in there, but the only one that might have given the Imperials an inkling of what she had been up to was the datapad, and that was linked to her biometrics. A good slicer might be able to circumvent the failsafes Galen had installed, but she doubted it would occur to them to find a slicer until after someone who wasn't Jyn tried to power up the device and found nothing but wiped data and fried circuits in their hands.

            Yung gave Jyn a push, not trying to hurt but also making no attempt at being gentle, and sent Jyn sprawling across one of the two low benches that lined either side of the back of the cockpit, passenger seating with just enough of a pad over them that they could double as bunks for the pilot and copilot during long cargo hauls. Jyn had slept on them a time or two. They were wickedly uncomfortable, the pad not thick enough to actually keep elbows and knees from pressing against the plasteel beneath – or to prevent Jyn's hip from giving a dull throb when she landed.

            "You bantha-brained little idiot," Yung said, and it was clear that she was aiming for the kind of devastating calm with which a officer was supposed to deliver a reprimand and failing miserably, rage crackling through her voice like lightning waiting to strike, the edge of a storm beneath that thin veil of calm. She tossed Jyn's stun baton and the blaster she had confiscated from Jyn's unresisting hands back in the alley onto the second bunk.

            Jyn braced her bound hands against the edge of the bench and pushed herself into a more upright position. She tilted her chin up to look at Yung. "That's a surprisingly mild  rebuke for murder," she said. "Would you like to try again?"

            If her goal was to get shot as quickly as possible to avoid spilling sensitive secrets, Yung certainly looked like she was rapidly approaching _angry enough to kill_. Maybe she would. _I pulled the trigger myself_ , Yung had told her, across a desk that was parsecs away and years in the past now. Yung liked Jyn, but Yung had liked Tag, too, because no one had ever been able to entirely avoid liking Tag. Jyn had never expected mercy from that quarter.

             Out of the corner of her eye, Jyn could see Bodhi, standing frozen with one hand resting on the top of his seat. She willed him silent. She didn't, couldn't, cherish the Force the way her mother had, but she thought about praying. There was nothing he could do for her except live to fight another day. She wanted Bodhi to see another day.

            "Where did you even get a blaster?" Yung muttered.

            "You can get a lot of things on the landing docks of Kafrene," Jyn said, a lie she had been practicing in the back of her head since they had taken her. "Blasters. Men who will teach you how to use one on the house, if you flatter their ego a little. You might not want to ask too many questions about that, though. Someone might start to wonder where I got the money."

            It was a good lie, as desperate lies went. Nothing like the threat of being found partially culpable for a screw up to make any good Imperial officer second guess whether they _really_ wanted the full story.

            "I just don't understand," Yung said. "What could have _motivated_ you?"

            Jyn bit back a laugh, then reconsidered and let it spill from her lips, bitter and sharp like the first taste of something poisonous, or like over a decade of some injury hidden until it had festered and turned ugly. "You killed my mother in front of me. You stole me from my home and took my father away. Your Empire did that. You think there's a single one of you that I wouldn't see dead if I could?"

            "I trusted you," Yung said, like she thought that it would still have any power to sting.

            _Troublesome_ , Krennic had called her mama before his men had opened fire. _Lyra, troublesome as ever_. Everyone remembered that Jyn was her father's daughter, because that was what made her valuable, that was what turned her into a weapon that could be used against the greatest mind that had ever turned his back on the Empire and walked away. Lyra hadn't mattered to them, and so they forgot that Jyn was her daughter too. If Jyn was a weapon, she aimed to be a malfunctioning blaster or a vibroblade with a cheap grip, something that could blow up in or burn the hand that wielded it. She aimed to be Lyra's daughter. She aimed to be _troublesome_.

            "You shouldn't have," Jyn said simply.

            There was anger in the slant of Yung's jaw, and maybe something that wasn't anger in the way that she scrubbed her fingers over the front of her trousers before turning away. "I need to clear us for takeoff. You, with me." She snapped her fingers at one of the Death Troopers. "You two," she briefly swung toward the second trooper and, behind him, Bodhi. "You stay here. Get the ship ready and don't stray. I want us ready to go." Her boots as she departed were louder against the ramp than the Death Trooper's were (she applied them with more force), and the three people who remained were silent in the wake of her passing.

            The silence lasted the thirty seconds it took Jyn to decide that she needed to break it, because Bodhi was still staring at her. "What are you looking at, flyboy?" She hoped that would be enough of a reminder for him.

            He stepped closer, hand falling away from the back of the seat and feet shuffling across the floor of the ship until he had drawn even with her bunk, just a few paces left between them. The Death Trooper didn't say anything, just shifted enough to keep out of Bodhi's way and to give himself room to maneuver if he needed it.

            "Jyn," Bodhi said, "what did you _do_?"

            "I killed someone," Jyn said, and thought, _I did something stupid, and it's going to get me killed, so don't you do the same_. "Didn't you hear?" It took effort to tuck the corner of her mouth into a smile, effort to pair that smile with the kind of glare that had once intimidated Bodhi but would hopefully go unnoticed by the trooper. Cassian would have managed it better. "Shouldn't come too close to me, Rook. I might get you killed, too." It was the clearest warning she could offer. "You understand?"

            The flinch was real; Jyn didn't think Bodhi was a good enough actor to fake it. It was gone in a flash, however, his face smoothing out into something calmer but more grim. "I understand," he said, and took a step back, and then another.

            "Leave him alone, Erso," the Death Trooper said, and he sounded bored but was apparently committed enough to wave his rifle in her direction. "You're in enough trouble as it is. Don't—."

            "Don't move," Bodhi said.

            In his hands was Cassian's blaster, taken from where Yung had left it on the second bunk. He'd barely managed to rasp out the words, and he in no way sounded entirely committed to this course of action or even slightly convinced that it was the right one – but the hands holding the blaster were steady and sure in a way that Jyn's wouldn't have been. Somewhere, at some point, Bodhi Rook had learned how to fire a blaster.

            "Actually," he said, "do. Do move. Get off of my ship. Right now."

            The Death Trooper lifted his hands from his rifle, and it fell to rest against his body, still suspended by its strap. He took a step backwards toward the door that lead to the hangar, but slowly, and Jyn knew that behind the shining black of his helmet he was calculating the odds, measuring Bodhi's resolve and the chances that a blaster shot from a weapon that had bordered on obsolete a decade ago would actually penetrate the heavier armor issued to the Death Troopers. She knew what kind of odds he would see, this man who had trained for years to serve and who was outfitted and armed with the best the Empire had to offer, and she knew that his weapon wouldn't stay lowered for long.

            She didn't give him the chance. Bodhi had cleared a path for her between her bunk and the one where Yung had left the weapons, and her hands were bound in front of her. She lunged low and hoped that she was out of Bodhi's line of fire. Her fingers closed around her baton just as the Death Trooper's twitched toward his own weapon.

            Jyn came up swinging, but her balance was off and she was unaccustomed to the way that the binders limited her range of motion. Her first strike was a wild, glancing one that bounced off the front of his armor, but it was enough to keep his hands away from his rifle. She raised the baton, and brought it down against his dominant wrist. She heard something crack, and wasn't sure if the _crack_ she heard was armor or the bone beneath.

            She was too far inside his reach for him to effectively point his weapon at her, but no Imperial had ever hesitated to use his blaster rifle as a crude bludgeon when technology failed him. The butt of the rifle hit her hip hard, although probably not as hard as it would have had he still had full use of both of his hands, and she stumbled back a few steps.

            "Jyn, down!"

            She dropped immediately, without even really thinking about it, but the blaster bolt still missed her by little enough that she could feel vibration of its passing against her spine. A moment later, a second body hit the ground.

            Jyn hadn't even realized that the shot had come from Bodhi's blaster until she found the masked face of the Death Trooper staring back at her. She rolled onto her back to look up at Bodhi.

            She wished that she had the kind of resolve it would take to be angry with him over ruining all of her carefully laid plans, but mostly she felt nearly boneless with relief. Jyn had been willing to die to see that word of the Death Star reached the ears that needed to hear it, but she hadn't wanted to die. Now it seemed like she might not have to. She was certain she ought to say something, but Bodhi spoke first.

            "You're going to tell me what happened," he said, "but you're going to do it after we get out of here." He was already in motion, dropping the blaster back on the bench and scrambling for his seat. It was enough to snap Jyn out of the daze of post-fight adrenaline and shaky relief, to refocus her on the situation they were now in. She was safer than she had been staring down the certainty of her own execution, but they weren't actually _safe_ yet.

            She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself to her feet with effort, leaving the baton on the floor behind her. She took a few unsteady steps and threw herself down in the copilot's chair. Slamming her palm over the button that would close the cargo door nearly bought her other hand into contact with half a dozen additional buttons, but she was rewarded with a quick, grateful look from Bodhi, his hands already moving much more dexterously over the controls than hers had.

            He paused and took a deep, slow breath. "I should tell you that I never qualified for TIE pilot training. I tried. Twice. Choked both times. They're probably going to shoot us out of the sky. We're probably going to die."

            "So," Jyn said, after pausing to consider, "you're telling me that my odds of survival have improved dramatically." When he looked at her, she shrugged. "I was going to die anyway. You're the one whose lot in life has changed."

            "You're not helping," Bodhi said.

            "Wishing you'd left me to my fate?"

            "No," Bodhi said. "Your father would've never forgiven me." He took another breath, and his hands flew back into motion. "This is for you, Galen."  

 

            They limped their way to a mostly uninhabited chunk of dirt and rock two and a half standard days later, as far from Kafrene as they could get without stopping to make repairs. Bodhi got to work, muttering imprecations about stingy requisitions officers who supplied cargo ships with only the most basic tools necessary for a quick fix-it job, and Jyn scrounged a couple of nutrition bars, tossing one to Bodhi before stretching out along the join of one of the shuttle's wings with the other. She ate her nutrition bar without much interest, and once or twice she allowed the quiet, persistent rhythm of Bodhi's work, punctuated occasionally by swearing, to lull her into a doze.

            The land wasn't much to look at, just thin, rusty-red dirt that the wind had caked thick on Jyn's face and clothes within an hour of their landing and the occasional tuft of dry grass, but the sky was remarkable at sundown, like all the color that had been leached from the earth had drifted upwards instead, vibrant crimson and orange and the occasional streak of pale yellow. The metal beneath her shoulders vibrated as Bodhi climbed up beside her. He had stripped down to his undershirt while he worked, his vest abandoned somewhere along the way and the sleeves of his flight suit knotted around his waist. The dirt and the wind had been no kinder to him than they had been to Jyn, and she could barely see the color of his beard peaking through the thick layer of grime, although there were two perfectly clear spots around his eyes where his goggles had sat while he worked. There was a streak of something black – probably from the ship – across his forehead, and he wiped absently at it as he sat beside her.

            "We're good," he said, drawing his knees up and resting his arms on top of them. "I'll need to do more than throw a patch on her sometime soon, but she'll get us where we need to go."

            That they had not yet discussed or decided where they needed to go went unsaid.

            Jyn wouldn't run, not without her father (she hadn't decided yet if she would run once she had him). She was almost certain that if she did run it would be without Bodhi at her back. In his way, he was as committed to this now as Cassian was.

            _This isn't a cause for you, it's a hobby_ , Cassian had said. He was wrong. She had proven that. The cause had just never been her _only_ priority the way it was his, and she wasn't sure if she had anything left to prove. She could leave now, and know that she had done her part.

            No. She wasn't going to run, not back to Galen and not once she had him. The first was impossible without the assistance of the Rebellion; the second was impossible because she wanted to be able to meet his eyes when she did see him again. Besides, her family had tried running once before. It hadn't ended well. Perhaps there were places that the shadow of the Empire's banners didn't brush against, but Jyn didn't know where they were, if even somewhere as remote as Lah'mu hadn't been safe. Fighting might not change the outcome, but at least she would be able to say that she had tried. Fighting might not change the outcome, but at least she would _get_ to fight, and Jyn thought she had probably been spoiling for a fight for the last thirteen years.

            Other considerations aside, she had no money, few skills, and almost no one who knew her name outside of the Empire. There were not many places she could turn other than to the Rebellion, and for a moment she chafed at how much that felt like a new trap closing around her, even if there were no walls and no one watching over her shoulder. She had finally escaped the Empire, but it didn't matter how angry she was or how little she now trusted her allies: she would still offer herself up to be used, because there were no other options available to her, not if she wanted to fight, not if she wanted to rescue her father, and not if she wanted to survive. Especially not if she wanted all three of those things.

            "What are you thinking?" Bodhi asked, watching her out of the corner of his eye, and Jyn realized that she had been silent too long.

            "I'm trying to decide if my pride is worth our lives," she said.

            The corner of his mouth tucked up into a reluctant smile. "Do I get a vote?"

 

            They picked planets with a lighter Imperial presence, especially after Bodhi spotted flickering holograms of Jyn's face and his own on the first moon they landed on to make more extensive repairs and so that Jyn could access the dead drop she knew was there. Jyn started wearing a scarf over her hair and abandoned Tag's jacket in favor of something less distinctively hers. Bodhi wore his goggles when he left the ship and tore the patches off his flight suit. As disguises went, neither was very good, and they never lingered in once place long.

            Four of the drop locations Jyn had been given all those years ago and in the years since were located in places where she felt safe visiting given her current circumstances. One of the four had disappeared in the time since Jyn had been told of it, either because its location had been compromised or because weather or some curious passerby had intervened. It had happened before, although not often; Fulcrum chose his hiding spots well.

            In each location Jyn left the same information, scratched out on flimsi: _bodhi rook is trying to make contact_ , followed by a place, a date, and a time. They had discussed the possibility of Jyn using her name, or even signing the note _lh_ as she had once before, but Jyn didn't really want to finish their zigzagging trip across the outer edged of the galaxy only to find no one waiting for them. As far as Cassian knew, she had been compromised, and any information she sent might be the lure for a trap. She couldn't take the risk. Bodhi Rook was who she had directed him to, and she might have reasonably given Bodhi the locations of her drops at any point before now, so Bodhi Rook would be the one leaving the messages.

            The night before they were supposed to leave for the rendezvous point, Jyn settled herself beside Bodhi on the landing ramp to the ship and handed him one of the plasto bowls that she was carrying, filled with stew purchased from a local vendor in exchange for the leather gloves Jyn had bought on Kafrene – their combined pool of credit chips had been too small to last for long. A fish head floated to the surface of Jyn's bowl, its single eye staring up at her balefully. She forced herself to dip her spoon into the broth anyway. She couldn't afford to be fastidious.

            Bodhi seemed to have no such hesitation, speaking between bites. "You haven't asked me yet," he said, "about the message Galen sent."

            Jyn hadn't forgotten, although it would have been reasonable if she had; survival and the formation of a plan had taken priority over the past several days. She couldn't explain her reluctance. Maybe she was just worried that whatever news Galen sent, it wouldn't be good news, and she had enough to deal with.

             She needed the update, though, and she wanted to be able to hear his voice again, even if it was only her own imagination filling in the blanks of what the data he sent would sound like had he rattled it off to her during some late night in the lab. "No time like the present, I guess."

            "C'mon," Bodhi said, slurping down the last of the broth in his bowl before rolling to his feet. "Holoprojector in the ship isn't much, but it'll do."

            Holoprojector. So, she would get a voice after all. "You haven't watched it?"

            Bodhi shrugged. "It wasn't meant for me."

            Ten minutes later, Jyn was standing in the cockpit, her bowl sitting forgotten on the edge of the console. She brushed her knuckles against her cheek impatiently, but her hand came away dry. She didn't know why she had thought it would be wet.

            "Jyn—."

            "I'm fine."

            Bodhi looked at her for a moment, and then tucked his chin in something that might have been an acknowledgement. "I was just going to ask if you planned on finishing your dinner," he said, so carefully nonchalant that there was no pretending that this was the question he had initially intended to ask. It was still enough to bring Jyn's shoulders down and coax a tired half-smile to her lips.

            "It's all yours," Jyn said, and dropped herself onto one of the bunks.

            She didn't sleep well, not even after Bodhi was snoring faintly in the second bunk, the steady rhythm of his breathing oddly comforting, but watching the message her father had sent had helped in other ways. She knew what she needed to do now. Talking to Galen had always been clarifying.

            Knowing helped, even if she didn't like it.

 

            Their final stop was not so different from the ones that had proceeded it: a planet in the Mid Rim just populous enough to boast a handful of small cities scattered across its surface, and with enough human residents that she and Bodhi wouldn't particularly stand out. Bodhi had been the one to suggest it, and he was the one who led the way as they wound through the streets.

            "This was part of the route for one of my first postings," Bodhi said nostalgically, and then looked immediately guilty for sounding nostalgic. Jyn caught his eye and shrugged; just because they had both left the Empire didn't mean that every memory was a bad one.

            It was spring in this hemisphere of this planet (it had been winter on the last one, the kind of mild winter where the snow seemed to melt before it had even touched the ground; here it was the kind of spring where Jyn was glad that her scarf covered her ears and neck). The locals were used to their chilly springs, however, and there were plenty of people in the park Bodhi led her to, walking the footpaths or standing near the edge of the lake, feeding treats to the iridescently feathered, sharp-toothed creatures clustered in the shallows. Most of the benches lined up in back-to-back in pairs along the path were occupied, but Jyn and Bodhi found an empty set deeper in the park. Jyn took the bench facing the lake. Bodhi settled on the ground a few feet away, legs stretched out in front of him and fingers tugging at the bright green grass with the idle fascination of a man who had spent most of his life on a desert planet. He seemed relaxed, but Jyn wondered whether any part of his chosen seating arrangement had been dictated by his desire to see the path behind her, watching her back and allowing her to watch his. Jedha was a warzone. Jedha had been a warzone for as long as Jyn could remember, and Bodhi had spent his childhood there.

            It was—strange. Jyn had been a spy for the better part of three years, but she'd been on her own for most of those years. Other than the brief few months with Cassian on Kafrene, she'd never had someone watching her back, never had any choice about keeping her shoulders against the wall, both literally and figuratively. Strange, but nice, too.

            Bodhi's gaze flicked to something over her shoulder, and she had a good thirty seconds of warning before the back of her bench shifted with the weight of someone settling onto the second bench behind her.

            "You're not dead."

            She couldn't see much of Cassian out of the corner of her eye, but she doubted there would be much to see even if she could. He'd had plenty of time between spotting her on the bench and sitting down to make his face say whatever he wanted it to say.

            "I'd noticed," Jyn said.

            "Are you compromised?"

            "Would I tell you if I was?"

            He was too disciplined to turn to look at her, but she saw the way he tilted his head to look up the path, so that she was more clearly centered in his peripheral vision. "You'd figure out a way."

            "Finally decided you know where I stand?"

            "You didn't give me much of a choice."

            "This is great," Bodhi said, clearly torn between finding them funny and finding them deeply irritating; he was much easier to read than Cassian was. "It's _just_ like the holodramas."

            Jyn caught his eye and allowed herself the edge of a smile. "The pelikki flies at midnight."

            "This is Bodhi Rook?" Cassian asked, but not in such a way that Jyn thought he actually needed an answer, so she didn't offer one. He nodded quickly, as though she had answered after all, and continued. "We need to talk. Somewhere more private."

            "You lead," Jyn said, "we'll follow."

            He unfolded himself from the bench and took the step forward that removed him from her line of sight. When he said, "Jyn?" she turned her head reflexively.

            "It's good you're not dead," Cassian said, the corner of his mouth turning up into what might generously be called a smile, like there was some joke in his words that she was missing. It was tempting to read more into the comment, but Jyn had known for years that most of her value to other people lay in her utility.

            "You'll need me," she said agreeably. She wasn't sure what to make of the way his eyes lingered for a moment, too-keen, before he turned and started down the path, walking quickly enough that it was clear he didn't intend to linger, but not so quickly that it would draw the attention of a passerby – or lose the two people following him at a distance.

            Jyn waited until he was nearly at the bend in the path that would take him out of sight and rose. "Come on."

            "If the Rebels like me," Bodhi said as he stood, voice mild but shoulders raised defensively, "maybe they'll give me a decoder, and I can play spy too."

            "I'll buy us a Jolly Meal when this is all over, and you can have the prize," Jyn said, because it was easier and kinder to lean into the joke than it was to point out what they both already knew: that the time for playing at anything was long since passed.

 

            The inn that Cassian led them to was small enough to barely warrant the title, shoved narrow and deep between two larger buildings like an afterthought. Inside there was barely room for the bar and a single table, which stretched the entire length of the building and would have been engineered for the most uncomfortable kind of forced socializing were it not for the fact that there were only three people inside: Cassian, a human who glanced up briefly through their lashes before returning their gaze to the cloth they were pushing desultorily over the bar, and a Morseerian with a vibromop in his hands, who made what might have been eye contact with Jyn through the goggles of his breath mask before pointedly turning away.

            "Are they—?" Jyn started to ask when she reached Cassian, for all that she wasn't sure how to end the question.

            "I don't know," Cassian said, fingers skimming over her elbow for the moment it took to steer her toward the back of the room. As she stepped through the door set into the back wall, she heard him sigh. "Probably, but I was given the location by another Fulcrum. If they're working for the Rebellion, it's through her, and it's better for everyone that none of us ask too many questions."

            Another Fulcrum, and the intriguing possibility of a network of spies and rebel cells that stretched further than Jyn had ever imagined, even with her dozens of dead drops and all the information she had sent and received over the years. It was the most information Cassian had every provided her with unprompted, and with no ulterior motive that she could see. She wondered if doing so had cost him something.

            The back room was dark, but she could see Cassian kneel before her, his fingers tracing over the edges of the large tiles that covered the floor. It took him a moment to find what he was looking for, and when he did, he leaned into one of the tiles, putting his weight on it. There was a sharp pop and the tile swung up, pivoting on some invisible hinge, to reveal a narrow durasteel ladder and an even deeper darkness than the one in which they stood.

            Jyn looked down with some very firm misgivings. She had climbed into a hole like this one once before (or maybe not quite, since the hole on Lah'mu had been rough stone and had smelled like wet and mildew; here, her nose only caught a dry whiff of dust and stale air). "Is there a light?"

            "Once you reach the bottom," Cassian said, and the only thing the propelled Jyn forward to the edge was that she didn't want to be caught hesitating.

            She could have climbed with her eyes closed, for all the difference it made, feeling with her feet for each rung and trying to pretend that her hands weren't damp enough to make the metal beneath them slick. She could hear Bodhi start the climb once she was partway down, and then the snap of the tile sliding back into place a moment before her boots brushed the ground.

            The moment they did, the dark began to fade, lighting panels set into the ceiling flickering to life. Jyn stood still as she allowed her eyes to adjust, and Bodhi jostled into her as he reached the bottom of the ladder.

            "Well," he said as he looked around, "whether they're Rebels or not, they're definitely up to _something_."

            The modest stack of dry goods and kegs kept near the ladder were to be expected, even for an inn so small and so sparsely populated. The racks of neatly ordered bottles and stacks of unlabelled crates that created a maze of irregular and branching pathways through the cavernous space beneath the inn seemed like less likely stock for a place that probably couldn't serve more than twenty people in the downstairs dining room, or offer sleeping space to more than a handful of weary travelers at a time, even if the second story was set up dormitory style rather than as individual rooms.

            "Smugglers?" Jyn wondered.

            "Smugglers," Bodhi agreed, nodding off to the side, where an irregular hole had been cut into the duracrete wall, a tunnel that had clearly not been signed off on by any local authority, and which most likely led off to an equally unauthorized landing field. Jyn had seen similar setups in the past; her year of dropping hints to strangers in bars in the hopes of finding Saw Gerrera had led her to some interesting places when the person she was speaking to assumed she was looking to be involved in some _other_ illicit dealing, and her years of spying for Cassian had taken her down some equally interesting paths. The smuggler captain that Jyn had sent Tivik with on Kafrene had not been the first Jyn had dealt with, although she had been a uniquely pleasant specimen. Most of them were scoundrels.

            "The right vintage can buy a lot in the Core, and many of the further flung outposts still use barter as often as credits," Cassian said, but he seemed reluctant to say more.

            "Fighting the Empire isn't cheap," Jyn said. She didn't judge. Her own carefully hoarded stack of credits, gone now, had not always been acquired through strictly legal means. Tag had taught her to gamble. He had also taught her to cheat.

            Bodhi caught her eye, and the corner of his mouth ticked up in a nervous smile. "Think they have anything good?"

            The datastick that her father had sent seemed suddenly heavy in the pocket of the thick vest she had snagged in a spaceport two – or was it three? – planets ago. "Why don't you go find out?"

            Bodhi quickly disappeared among the crates of contraband, and Jyn turned to find Cassian looking at her with one eyebrow raised. "I'm not having this conversation sober," she said and, when his expression didn't change, she leaned a little closer, nearly into his personal space. "Come on. Don't tell me that you've never poured a glass or two for an informant to get them to loosen up and spill all of their secrets."

            "You're not an informant," Cassian said.

            "What am I, then?"

            He was watching her, eyes heavy-lidded and expression carefully blank, and she couldn't have said what he was thinking if her life had depended on it – which was a pity, because it so often had. "An ally, I hope."

            "Hope?" she asked, and she could feel the smile on her face, faint and disbelieving.

            "Yeah," he said, closer than she remembered him being, leaning into her space now as she had leaned into his. "Rebellions are built on hope."

            She tried to come to terms with the idea that the man who considered shooting his assets in alleys was also a bit of an idealist, although perhaps she shouldn't have been surprised; Tivik had as good as told her so. "I could be a good ally," she said eventually. "Better than you know."

            "We haven't talked about what happened on Kafrene," Cassian said, and he was still standing too close, his gazed too fixed, for her mind not to flash briefly to the kiss – if it could be called a kiss. Personally, she was leaning toward _half-mad scramble to grab as much of life as possible before getting shot_.

            She wasn't stupid, though. She knew what he was getting at. "The planet killer," she said. She stepped back just as Bodhi rounded the corner of a shelf, a dark-tinted transparisteel bottle in hand. She tucked her own hands into the pockets of her vest, fingers curling loosely around the datastick. "Yes. We should probably talk about that."

 

            Even now, it was good to see Galen's face, washed of color though it was and in spite of the occasional flickering of the smugglers' aged holoprojector. It wasn't enough of him, and did nothing but fuel the dull ache of missing him low in Jyn's chest, but it was something, and more than she'd had in months. She was glad that she'd watched it before, that she knew the words that would be spoken already and could focus on schooling her face into something closer to the blank expression she used at the sabacc tables.

            "Jyn," Galen's holograph said, eyes fixed straight ahead, like he would have caught and held her gaze had she not been standing slightly to the left, where she wouldn't impede Cassian's view. She held out her hand, and Bodhi passed her his bottle without comment. She took a swig, the wine bursting bitter-sharp against her tongue and the back of her teeth. "My Stardust. If you are watching this, then it means Bodhi has been able to deliver my message, and that there is a chance to stop the Death Star—and a chance for you."

            He smiled, faint and soft, and Jyn took another drink to wash away the tightness in her throat. "The modifications I spoke to you of have been completed. I will not name them here, in case this message in intercepted. You know what I've done, and what I aimed to do." He paused, took a breath. "You know how to guide the rebels to the weakness I have designed, although you don't know it yet."

            She did now. She had watched the hologram recording before.

            "I know where they have sent the plans, the structural plans, for the Death Star," Galen said. "I've known for months. I hope—I hope that, should we meet again, you will give me a chance to explain myself and, though I don't dare hope for too much, that with time you will once again offer me your forgiveness." His expression was soft and sad, so sad and so tired, and the center of Jyn's chest was nothing but empty space, a hollow place that had held Lyra's shape for years and had expanded in the past months to tuck Galen in beside that first, devastating loss. "I have made you into a weapon, my Stardust. It was never what I wanted, but you were the only chance I had, to save you – to save so many people – from this thing which I have built. I've already given you everything you need. Knowledge is a tool, and no one knows better than I do the cost that comes with having it. Were it not for the things I know, we would have never have been in danger." He shifted a bit, and the image flickered again, like a flame burning itself out. "But there is power to be had in knowing something that no one else knows, too. Were it not for the things I know, I wouldn't have been able to keep you safe for so many years. To know something is to be invaluable— _indispensable_. I have made you into a weapon, but I have made you into a weapon too keen and too deadly to be easily thrown away. I hope that your friends in the rebellion will remember that, when the time comes. You're so far from me, now. This is all the safety I can offer you."

            Jyn didn't look at Cassian. She didn't dare. She felt Bodhi shuffle closer to her side, and handed him the bottle mutely.

            "The plans are in the military archive on Scarif," Galen said. "I trust you recognize the name. I trust that, by now, you've had enough time that you know what to do with it. More than anything, I trust you to finish what I've started." He smiled again, wry this time. "I might wish that you wouldn't do it _yourself_ , but I know when I'm facing an argument I can't win."

            Especially when they weren't in the same place _to_ argue.

            "Jyn," Galen said, and then he paused, like this part had been more difficult for him. "Jyn, my beloved. So much of my life has been wasted, save only the hours you and I have been able to steal between us. These past months since you were taken from me have been difficult. I cannot tell you how difficult. I try to think of you only in the moments when I'm strong, because the pain of not having you with me – your mother, our family – the pain of that loss is so overwhelming I risk failing even now. It's just so hard not to think of you." He stopped, and there was little to mark in his face or his manner, because Galen really had become a much more accomplished liar over the years, but Jyn watched the way that his chest moved when he breathed in, long and slow, like a man bracing himself against pain. "My love for you has never faded, even in the moments when I made you doubt it. I loved you then, and I love you still. Believe that, if you believe nothing else."

            Jyn reached out and pulled the datastick from the projector, ignoring the complaining whirr it gave as the hologram flickered and died. She wished she'd done it sooner. Cassian might have all of her secrets now, or he soon would, but there were things she didn't need him to see.

            "What did he mean, Jyn?" Cassian asked.

            "Love is an emotion experienced by some sentients where—," Bodhi started, prickly and defensive the way he had only ever been about himself when she had first met him, and it layered something warm and frighteningly soft under the twist in her throat, but she waved him off. This was a question she wanted Cassian to ask.

            She had her datapad on her, because she hadn't parted with it since she had first watched her father's message; she carried it wedged uncomfortably into her belt during the day and tucked it beneath the thin mattress of her bunk at night. Her fingers were clumsy on the cables that would connect it to the projector, and she chose to blame the wine.

            Blue lines spiraled up from the projector, as familiar as her own face in the mirror even if this was the first time she had seen them in three dimensional space. She circled the edge of the table, eyes searching over the new angles that the projection had revealed, already beginning to make mental notes, but now wasn't the time. A question had been asked, and the architectural diagram in front of her was part of the answer.

            Near the bottom of the structure hung words neatly written in the hand of some anonymous draftsman: _Archive - Tropical_. Like so many of the Empire's engineering feats both marvelous and mundane, the design had either been reused enough times that it couldn't be pinned down to anything more specific than having been built with a tropical climate in mind, or it had been drafted by some think tank as isolated as the one on Eadu before the bureaucracy of the Empire had narrowed the prospective location down to one of half a dozen worlds with tropical climates. Either way, the drawing didn't name a planet. That didn't matter; the large body of supplemental documents that Galen had provided her with used Scarif's name more than once.

            (Months, he'd known for months, long enough that he had been able to give her Scarif to study before he had started his last desperate push to turn the Death Star from the Empire's greatest triumph into its greatest failure, and Jyn wasn't sure how she felt about that or how she was supposed to feel, any more than she knew what to do with the way that the final words in his message had been shaped like love but sounded like _goodbye_.)

            "This is all the intel I have on the archive at Scarif," Jyn said. "It's yours, if you want it. You can pass it on to whomever you usually pass this kind of thing to. They can spend a few months devising a strategy on how to infiltrate the archive, or—I don't know what kind of resources you have. Maybe you can afford to just throw warm bodies at the Empire until someone breaks through and gets you what you need. Seems an awful waste, though, when I've _already_ spent months planning my way in. I can get you the plans for the Death Star. I can." She dared a quick glance at Cassian, but his expression was no more revealing than it ever was. "I told you I could be a good ally. I'll want something in return."

            It was a tangled rush of words and every one of them felt sharp and ugly in her mouth, not in the least because she knew that he wouldn't be wrong to call it a bluff. Galen would want her to give the Rebellion their best chance of success, and Jyn had already proven that she would, if pushed by circumstance, fold her winning hand so that the Rebellion might take the pot. Kafrene _had_ proven that, if nothing else.

            "You said you had things to lose," Cassian said, which was better than most of the things that she had imagined he might say: that they would have had months to plan had she not held the secret of the Death Star's existence so tight, that she played at rebellion like it was a game or a hobby, that she couldn't be trusted enough to help.

            "I have one thing to lose," Jyn said, and gestured toward the projector even though Galen's hologram had been replaced by the map of Scarif's archive. He hadn't yet called her bluff, so now seemed an opportune time to double down. "You have a lot more. You should accept my offer."

            _I've made you into a weapon_ , Galen had said, and perhaps she wasn't one in the traditional sense – she'd barely been trained to fight, didn't know how to hold a blaster – but perhaps she was a different kind of weapon. She imagined that the shucking knife that pried open the edge of an oyster's shell felt as much like a weapon as a blaster bolt did, to the oyster. She would allow the Rebellion to use her to pry open a gap in the hard outer casing of the Empire, but she would do it on her own terms, and she wouldn't forget that she could be dangerous. She held onto the thought as she offered the trade she had, in one form or another, spent years planning for, and pushed her fists into her pockets so that she wouldn't risk her hands shaking.

            "Jyn," he said, and then sighed. "I would have helped. I was planning to help."

            The words were familiar, but it took her a moment to place them as her own, something she had said to him in one of the many darkened side-streets they had roved on Kafrene. The heat and the air in her lungs went rushing out of her, and she felt shaky at their loss, like she was reeling from a gut punch or like anger and desperation were the only things holding her together and holding her in place from moment to moment. Cassian was watching her, and she didn't know how to be if the things she wanted were there for the asking, didn't know what to say if they were trying to be honest and perhaps kind now instead of circling each other in the dark and seeing who came out ahead. "Oh," she finally settled on. "Okay."

            "So he'll go to Eadu," Bodhi said, and took a swig from the bottle, "and you'll go to this archive, and we'll all try not to die." He considered the bottle, but bravely did not take another drink. "It's a plan." He did not say that it was a good plan, and Jyn smiled at him wryly.

            "I can't go to Eadu," Cassian said, and Jyn felt her shoulders tense, as if those few words had revised the last few minutes out of existence and they were back on Kafrene, stepping into the start of the same argument. He caught her eye and shook his head quickly, like he could see her readying herself for a fight. "You don't want me on Eadu," he said. "I contacted my command before I heard from you. I have orders."

            For a moment, Jyn scrambled to figure out why he would have orders to avoid Eadu, when they had been given to him before she had made contact and provided him with an alternative path to the Death Star's destruction. No, that couldn't have been it, so someone had to have given him orders about what to do once he _reached_ Eadu, orders that he thought she would dislike enough that she wouldn't want him to attempt a rescue of her father—.

            Her father. Galen Erso. She had given him the name, and she had spent years knowing exactly what reaction the Rebellion might have to that name.

            "You'd do it," she said, faint and disbelieving. "After everything I've told you, after everything I've _done_ , you're still planning to follow orders. You might as well be—."

            "I'm asking you not to make me choose," he said, sharp enough to stop her from saying something that she might regret, later, when the anger that had found its way back into her lungs had rushed away again. "The things you told me were never going to be enough. They were never going to believe the word of an Imperial science officer and his defector daughter."

            "They didn't believe you about any of it, did they?" Jyn asked. "Not just my father. They didn't believe you about the planet killer, either."

            Cassian's mouth set in something like displeasure, although Jyn was certain now that it wasn't entirely directed at her. "The decision wasn't unanimous. We'll have some support—if you want it."

            "If _I_ want it," Jyn repeated.

            "I believe you," Cassian said. "You're going after the plans." He shrugged, so carefully casual and not at all up to his usual standards of pretense. "I'd just like to volunteer."

            "And Galen?" Bodhi asked, and she could feel him practically vibrating at her side, like a blaster in the moments before it overheated. "You said you'd help."

            "Plenty of people who owe me favors," Cassian said, and he smiled, small and _real_ in a way that most of his smiles weren't. It could have been devastating, had Jyn been less determined to hold her anger close and protective this time, so that the next terrible thing he said might come as less of a surprise, for all that she was starting to realize that perhaps this was not a start of another fight, that perhaps this was just what honesty looked like when someone was carrying so many ugly secrets. "Plenty of people who feel like they owe you favors, too. Spies, saboteurs, assassins – they all rely on good intel to do their jobs, to get in and get out and get home safely. You've given us a lot of good intel, over the years. You'd be surprised by how many friends you already have in the Alliance. Some of them might not mind helping." The tilt of his smile changed before disappearing entirely. "Some of them might not mind having the chance to save a life, for once." He looked at Bodhi. "I hear we have a pilot who might know the way."

            Jyn exchanged a look with Bodhi, but she knew already that she would agree, that the compromise Cassian was proposing was—good. Better than anything she had expected from him, certainly. "Don't make me regret this," she said, even though she knew it was basically asking for a lie, that it would be a lie even if he meant whatever reply he offered her. When Cassian just dipped his head in acknowledgement and said nothing, she very nearly smiled.

 

            K-2SO was the first new arrival to their makeshift headquarters, snuck in through the smugglers' tunnel after dark that first night because the Imperial base here wasn't large enough for him to go as unremarked upon as he did on planets more heavily occupied. He wasn't the last.

            They came alone or in groups of two, slipping in through the tunnel or winding their way through the crowd upstairs – because there was a crowd after dark, no matter how abandoned the place had seemed when they had first arrived, the distant chatter of voices filtering down past the closed hatch and the occasional shower of dust from the ceiling when someone's dancing got a bit too exuberant – to climb down the same ladder that had brought Jyn to this hole in the ground.

            There was a square-jawed, brown-skinned young man who had joined the Rebellion only a handful of months earlier, who didn't seem to be a part of Cassian's intended crowd of saboteurs and double dealers but who had gamely trailed in after a pale, waiflike human woman and an individual of a species Jyn couldn't even pretend to recognize, but whose brow tufts and whiskers flicked this way and that every time that someone so much as stirred the otherwise still air of the hidden storeroom. There was a tall human man who lifted Jyn off her feet and said, "the one who sent the plans for the munitions plant they were building, yes?" and bounced her a couple times before putting her down and pronouncing, "this will be good fun." That was unnerving enough, but remained slightly less unnerving than the Drabatan who only smiled when he was piecing together bombs, his back against a wall and his short legs sprawled in front of him, always with zero regard for the fact that if he miscalculated, he would bury them all.

            "We'll have some air support, unless I'm missing the mark," the one called Melshi said, two fingers slid under the edge of his hat to scratch idly at his scalp. "You know pilots. They're getting itchy just cooling their heels, and they know as well as the rest of us that no one's going to shout them down – much – for not awaiting orders, as long as the mission brings _results_." He looked at her and grinned faintly.  "We're a bit of a ragtag bunch. Hard to impose military discipline on _that_."

            Jyn lifted a brow, and allowed that to convey that, while it was _nice_ to know that she probably wouldn't be court-martialed, knowing was not actually going to significantly improve her opinion of the Alliance.

            Something went _boom_ from one of the nooks at the back of the room where people had set up cots and sleep mats. Dust showered down on Jyn's hair, but since the ceiling didn't immediately follow, she brushed it away and returned her eyes to the notes Bodhi had made on the Eadu approach. "Don't think I hadn't noticed."

 

            Sefla put her on the ground, but not before she hit him hard enough in the knee to leave him limping for the rest of the day.

            "Not bad, sarg," he muttered, and he used his grip on her hand enough to lever her up off the floor. "Might make a soldier out of you yet."

            "I'm not your sergeant," Jyn said, and she certainly wasn't a soldier, but she was laughing a little when she said it.

 

            "We need a second pilot," Jyn decided, and she was so tired that her eyes ached, because getting roped into a planning session with Kay had always been a bad idea. He didn't need to sleep, and he had very little sympathy for her petty human fallacies, for all that he had been swift enough to chase _Cassian_ off to an unoccupied cot over an hour earlier. (Jyn didn't really mind; Cassian had been up longer and out later, chasing after one of the leads Jyn had given him that would eventually be their entry into Scarif. He had earned his rest.)

            "Cassian—."

            "We need someone on the ground and ready to go, and Cassian will be with me. _You're_ the one who insisted that my chances of survival were higher if I didn't go in alone."

            "I regret having done so every day," K-2SO said. "To think, I could have simply remained silent, and allowed what I now see is the ideal outcome to progress without interference."

            "Less than ideal for me."

            "I am aware."

            Jyn opened her mouth to respond, but Bodhi, sitting silent until now and half-dozing at the edge of the table, beat her to it. "It should be me."

            "They need you on Eadu," Jyn said, less because it was true – she and Bodhi had already given the rebels everything they knew about the planet, the laboratory, and the surrounding area – and more because she knew Eadu was where Bodhi wanted to be. It was where _she_ wanted Bodhi to be; she'd have more faith in the mission's success if there was at least one person involved who actually cared whether Galen lived or died.

            " _You_ need me on Scarif," Bodhi said, and he sounded calm and sure, the same way he had sounded when he had decided to leave the Empire. Jyn still envied him that, just a little. "They'll just have to pull off their daring rescue without me. I'm with you."

 

            "What are you doing up here?" Cassian asked, when Jyn stepped through the door that led from the concealed hatch into the main room of the inn, the morning sunlight pouring through the broad front windows and bleaching everything pale gold, until she almost couldn't see the scratches on the table or the dark circles under Cassian's eyes.

            "Just wanted to see some daylight," Jyn said, brushing dirt from the knees of her pants. Their current underground accommodations didn't bother her, not really, except that sometimes she remembered that there were no windows and little ventilation, and then she needed the reminder that she had a way out, that no respectable smuggler's den was built without half a dozen bolt holes and escapes.

            Something in her voice or her face must have given her away, because Cassian was watching her more closely now. Or maybe not. She had caught him watching her more than once over the past days, and maybe that was what sent her drifting a few steps closer, closing the distance between the door she had entered through and the bar, where he had been doing something involving a piece of flimsi and a significant stack of credit chips.

            She caught a glance at the top of the flimsi, and bit back a smirk. Inventory. She supposed that their hosts, for all that they didn't acknowledge the twenty-odd rebels crowded into their secret basement, might be less than amused to find how much food – and how many bottles – had gone missing since their arrival. That Cassian was looking to settle accounts was a reminder of how soon they would be leaving.

            "I'm going to see the forger today," he said. "Did you want to come?"

            "All right," she said absently. Because she was looking for it, she could see the way his expression had shifted infinitesimally when she stepped into his space, still not enough to give much away, but definitely—something. She hadn't realized until now how infrequently she had seen him under anything other than cover of darkness. Daylight looked good on him.

            "We never did talk about what happened on Kafrene," Jyn said, chin tilted back and sunlight warm against her cheek and the side of her neck. He was watching her still, and it hadn't taken Jyn very long to figure out that she liked the way he looked at her, the way that he could focus on something that had his attention and not let that focus wander.

            If Cassian had misunderstood her meaning, she probably would have stepped back. She knew herself well enough to know that. She was good at grasping after the things that she needed, demanding them, finding a way to bring them into her greedy hands. She wasn't as good at asking when it wasn't a matter of life or death. She didn't know how to reach for something she wanted, for no better reason than that she wanted it.

            "We never did," he said. He lifted his hand, slowly, and Jyn held herself very still. They had been too cautious of each other for too long for any sudden movements. His fingers were cool against the sun-warmed skin of her jaw, and his thumb rested lightly against the corner of her mouth. He looked thoughtful, the set of his mouth almost tender, and Jyn—Jyn didn't know what to do with that, which was fine. She had always been good at improvising. She had always been a little reckless.

            She leaned in, stepped closer, braced her palm against the bar behind him, and he still didn't move his hand away until her mouth touched his, his fingertips dragging briefly against her neck before he rested them on the curve of her shoulder.

            Cassian kissed slow, almost methodical, like this was another conversation he was trying to find the edges to, another way of coaxing secrets from her mouth. Jyn let him have his way for a moment, but she was impatient, always had been, even if necessity had pressed her to become better at faking patience over the years. She pushed in and up, kissed him a little harder, until she felt his mouth open over hers, a little huff of air that could have been the start of a laugh or simply surprise.

            He hooked an arm around her waist, fingers splaying against the base of her spine as he tugged her closer, and she made a faint noise, sure that she shouldn't be able to feel the weight or the warmth of his hand quite so well through two layers of clothing. The kiss was fiercer now, but sweeter too, the slick slide of his tongue against her teeth and the curl of her hands in the front of his jacket, pressing herself close, closer, into the little whispers of space between them.

            His mouth on hers was still easy, soft and open, letting her set the pace, but his hands were more restless now, the one that wasn't looped around her waist roaming, pausing here and there in seeming fascination with the simplest things: an earlobe caught between his thumb and his second knuckle, fingers skimming over the dip in her collarbone and the thong her mother's kyber crystal hung from, palm pressing warm through her shirt against her shoulder, her arm, the swell of her hip. Her cheeks felt hot, and for a moment when his hand tightened reflexively against her hip it was almost too good, too much, because she'd known she'd wanted but hadn't meant to want like this.

            Cassian broke the kiss seconds before she would have, and for just a moment he looked blown open and dazed as she felt, eyes heavy-lidded and mouth yielding, before his expression cleared and reshaped itself into something more familiarly neutral. Jyn didn't mind – couldn't mind, not when she felt unsteady and a little raw and one wrong step away from bolting for the nearest exit. They both had their defenses.

            "We can talk about it—."

            "After," she agreed, because there was no point in borrowing promises from a tomorrow they might not have. Still, he didn't move to let her go immediately, so she pressed another sharp little kiss against his lips before disentangling herself. She brushed her hair behind her ear, and looked at him, and thought _maybe_.

            They went to see the forger. Mostly, that involved Cassian haggling over price enough not to be remarkable while the forger pointed a blaster at Jyn with one hand and put the finishing touches on their order with the other. From the way he smiled as he handed Cassian the completed parcel, she could guess that Cassian hadn't haggled him down _enough_ , but it seemed that someone in the Alliance was still willing to fund them even if no other support was to be offered, so credits at least hadn't been in short supply since she and Bodhi had joined back up with Cassian.

            "Let me pass word," Cassian said, once they were settled back in the ship. "Some of what we're up to will have leaked out – it's unavoidable, with this many people involved – but I need to give someone in command the details. I know you might not trust us very much right now, but someone needs to know what we're doing. Someone in the Alliance needs to be able to report back about the outcome. If we succeed, we'll need to get the information into the right hands quickly enough for it to do any good." He looked at her. "If we fail, especially if we fail, they'll need to know."

            She had her doubts that they would do anything even if they knew, but Cassian understood the Alliance better than she did, and she thought that even if she didn't currently place much trust in them, she could bring herself to trust him. "Do it."

            They were tired, tired and slow and rapidly running low on time; she could spare them both a fight. The quick, weary smile he sent her way before turning his attention to the ship's controls was nearly reward enough.

 

            "New lieutenant?" Dal asked as he put his tray down next to Andwane's. He dropped his helmet between them with the kind of carelessness that usually got Andwane snapping, but right now his squad mate was more focused on the question.

            "Shiny new, but I hear he's a bit of a hard case," Andwane said, and followed it with a snort. "Didn't have to spend the last year crawling through the mud with us, but the moment we get reassigned somewhere tropical? Sign up the officers."

            That was a lot more interesting than some new officer; Skessa in communications was sweet on Andwane, and he always heard about their assignments before any of the other rank and file did. "Really?" he asked, the lieutenant with his neatly trimmed mustache and too-sharp eyes already forgotten. "Somewhere tropical?"

 

            "Supply run, eh?" the sergeant said, as he looked over the scandocs presented to him by the pilot. "Huh. Didn't think we went out that far."

            "Problem with their usual supply line, I hear," the pilot said with a nervous shrug. "I don't ask too many questions."

            The sergeant barked out a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder, before returning the scandocs and transferring the shipping manifest to the onboard computer of a cargo vessel that was already loaded up with rations, fuel, potable water; he tried to shorten the wait time for the ones that he liked. "Good man. You'll live longer that way."

            "Yes, sir," the pilot said faintly, and then made the sergeant laugh again by adding, without a great deal of conviction, "I'm sure I will."

 

            Mirtha ran through her usual pre-flight checks and bit back a sigh. It wasn't Coruscant, but she would miss being posted at Makrin Main, where all the luxuries of a good-sized city were within easy reach.

            Then again, maybe it wasn't so bad getting shuffled to some backwater world with little to boast about that hadn't been directly built by the Empire. She'd probably finally manage to save some of her pay, like she kept promising herself she would.

            Her mood was not improved by the fact that the gunner who had previously been assigned to her had unexpectedly gone AWOL, and his replacement was _late_. Finally, she heard a footstep on the ramp behind her. She turned, and she was sure she would have said something to get their partnership off on exactly the wrong foot, except that after she got a good look at her new gunner she found that she no longer wanted to.

            "Another woman," she breathed. "Oh, _thank you_."

            "You're welcome?" the woman in question tried, and maybe she was a little daft if she didn't understand why Mirtha was glad not to be stuck with another failed flyboy who was certain that he could pilot her rig a hundred times better than she could, even if his only job was to point the guns and _maybe_ keep the ship in the air if something happened to Mirtha. Mirtha could deal with daft. She could even deal with the way that the gunner obviously hesitated before taking her chair. She was determined to be pleased with this new arrangement.

            "You're _brand_ new, aren't you?" she asked, trying to sound sympathetic rather than resigned. When the woman nodded, Mirtha shrugged. "Might be for the best, yeah?" She winked. "This way I get to train you up myself, just the way I like it."

            The woman didn't even seem to realize Mirtha was flirting, which was a shame but also probably for the best; close quarters and shared bunks never actually ended well. "Got a name?"

            "Kestrel. Kestrel Dawn."

            "That's pretty," Mirtha said cheerfully. "Stick with me, Kestrel, and you'll be fine."

 

            "Didn't think we'd be getting any of these in," Tom's partner said, and Tom leaned closer to see the contents of the crate they had just opened.

            He shook his head. "Probably got tossed in at the last minute. You know they don't care a wink if _our_ data ends up looking like a mess because whoever was loading in on the other end wasn't paying attention."

            "Eh, at least they sent along the files for it this time – keeps me from having to spend half the day filling out forms and shouting at people over the subspace comm to prove up provenance."

            Tom breathed a sigh of relief. "Run a diagnostic and activate it?"

            "Sure—no, wait. This says that diagnostics were run a week ago on—hmm, Eadu. You know where Eadu is?"

            "No. You care?"

            "Not really. No point in running a diagnostic if it's already been done, though."

            "Especially when our shift is almost over," Tom said pointedly. "Let's get it up and running and get out of here."

            A laugh was his answer, and by the time that the droid's photoreceptors had flickered to life, both of them were gone.

            "I don't see why _I_ was the one who had to be packed into a box," K-2SO informed the empty cargo bay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It seems that I've reached the point where once a week updates are no longer feasible, so it's possible the next couple chapters will also get posted on a two-to-three week schedule. (Hahaha, remember when I thought this would be five chapters and like twenty-five thousand words? Those were the days.)
> 
> Again, massive thanks to everyone who's left a kudos, and those of y'all in the comments have been _killing_ it, which I also very much appreciate. Here's lookin' at you.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel really strange warning for something almost-canonical, but I don't actually want to make anyone's fun fanfic reading hobby stressful, so there you go. Check the end notes if you want to know before you read the chapter.

            "I'm not sure I can do this," Jyn had told Cassian before they had parted, both to find their own way onto Scarif. It was a practical conundrum, not an ethical one: this was not the kind of spy she was. She had evaded and she had lied, had dug into things she wasn't supposed to see and talked to men she wasn't supposed to know, but she had never pretended to be anything other than what she was, and she had never been anywhere she wasn't supposed to be for more than an hour or two at a time. Jyn's strength as a spy had always been that circumstances had placed her further behind enemy lines than nearly anyone else could ever hope to be. She had never _had_ to pretend to be anyone else.

            "You'll figure it out," Cassian had said, and he had left it unspoken that she would _have_ to figure it out. When Jyn had cast him a dubious look, he'd turned his attention away from the holographic rendering of the complex on Scarif to focus on her. "You've been around Imperials your entire life. It can't be that hard for you to talk to them."

            At the time, Jyn had thought of Bodhi, who she had never meant to like, who she had made sweat for every ounce of her regard that he had eventually earned. She doubted that approach would win her friends among the Imperials on Scarif. She thought that Cassian might have been referring to Yung, who he had once seen her walking with on Hosk Station, or to Tag, his arm heavy across Jyn's shoulders and his smile a threat. She hadn't meant to like them, either, but she thought she probably had—even Yung, sometimes, even at the end, for all that she had meant it when she had told Yung that, after all the Empire had done, she had little forgiveness to offer those who served it still.

            She had wondered then if it was possible to walk herself back from that feeling enough to smile at the Imperials on Scarif the way she had at the young officers on Kafrene, not like she meant it but like she could pretend to for an hour or a day if it got her what she wanted. She still wondered that.

            She'd liked some of them, she reminded herself, and tried not to think about how much the past few weeks had felt like an escape years in the making, and how much being here now felt like stepping back into the cell and swinging the door shut behind her. Then she forced herself to smile at her pilot, and tried to make it as bright and uncomplicated as the one she saw reflected back at her. No one Jyn had ever loved smiled like that, and it seemed so wrong that Mirtha should be able to.

            "If we going to get stuck with a boring assignment, at least it's a _pretty_ boring assignment," Mirtha said, all Coruscanti vowels and the easy good cheer of someone who never needed to reach far to find something to say. The chatter had been something of a relief for Jyn. She'd barely needed to keep up the ruse of being Kestrel at all during the journey, not with Mirtha rushing to fill the silence. Under other circumstance, Jyn might have actually liked Mirtha: the talking should have been annoying, but Mirtha was as sweet as she was spoiled, a girl who had been denied little growing up and had signed up for flight training because she wanted an _adventure_. She liked to have her accomplishments recognized, but she was singularly unambitious – although that lack of ambition was limited to advancing through the ranks, if the hungry way that she was eyeing the sleek line of prototype TIE fighters, the fruit of Scarif's shipyard, was any indication. Jyn did not think Mirtha had been talking about the sandy beaches and blue skies when she had said _pretty_.

            "Thinking of leaving me already?" Jyn – or Kestrel – asked, gesturing to the fighters, which had room only for the pilot.

            "No," Mirtha said, and sighed before smiling again at Jyn. "I'm _terrible_ on the laser cannons. Just barely got passing marks. They'll never put me in one of those beauties."

            "So you'd leave me if they _let_ you," Jyn said, and reaching for the joke shouldn't have been so hard, but she was sure it would get easier. She only needed to pretend for a week or two; then they would have the plans, and Mirtha and her aspirations and her jarringly simple smile would be a thing of the past.

            "In a Coruscant minute."

            "At least you're honest."

            Mirtha laughed. "Which is why they didn't even bother testing me for intel work. Can you imagine?"

            Jyn's smile felt strained.

            "We've got a little under standard day before our transfer officially goes through," Mirtha said. "Want to hit the mess?"

            "Give me a minute," Jyn said, teasing the edge of a packet of cigarras out of her pocket. Mirtha rolled her eyes and wrinkled her nose but waved Jyn off. That was another thing to like about Mirtha. She spoiled herself as surely as her parents had spoiled her as a child, but she was as generous with her friends as she was to herself, and she was quick to decide that someone was a friend. She had been the one to buy Jyn the cigarras before they had left Makrin Main.

            It took very little effort to find the tucked away corner of the complex where troopers and pilots went to smoke their tabac while off duty. The officers might frown, but it was still a common enough habit that every base with a patch of open air had a spot like this one. It was also one of the few places other than the mess where no one would take a second glance at a cargo pilot and a recently arrived gunner who had no reason to know each other conversing, and there was more privacy here than in the mess.

            It had been Bodhi's idea. They had comlinks, mismatched things small enough to slide into the ear that looked to have been cobbled together from the scrap of other, better comlinks and whatever spare wires someone had found at the bottom of their kit, not unlike the ones Jyn had seen used by gamblers caught cheating at the sabacc tables, but Jyn was reluctant to use them – not in the least because she had only seen them used by cheaters who got _caught_.

            They would need the comlinks when they made their run for the vault. In the days leading up to it, while they established themselves on Scarif, it was best that they stick to old familiar patterns of Jyn's years long career as a spy: they would speak face-to-face when they could, and use dead drops when there was no other way to communicate without drawing attention.

            Bodhi came to stand a few feet from her, his shoulders braced against a half-finished piece of hull that would one day be affixed to one of the Empire's many war machines. His fingers were nimble as he pinched loose tabac from the canister in his vest pocket, practiced when he rolled his cigarra, for all that Jyn had never seen him smoke. Those same fingers were a little more clumsy when he lifted them to brush against the freshly shorn hair at the nape of his neck, one more small sacrifice made in the name of completing the mission. Close-cropped hair and clean-shaven cheeks might not seem like much of a disguise when the Empire had already spread Bodhi's image to every corner it could reach as that of a defector, but on him – so much younger looking, now, without that protective layer of scruff – it made enough of a difference that Jyn imagined his own mother would have some trouble recognizing him, were they to somehow, improbably, run into each other here on Scarif.

            She pressed her own shoulders against the solid metal bulk of the hull and felt the plastoid of her chest plate creak. She wondered if her father would recognize her.

            ("It's so strange, but you're kind of familiar," Mirtha had said at one point during the journey, her pretty face screwed into a frown. "Like I've seen you somewhere before." Jyn had touched her own hair, scraped flat against her skull in the kind of military precise style that she never would have dreamed of bothering with on her own.

            "Plenty of women who look just like me in the galaxy," Jyn had said.)

            "No trouble?" Jyn asked Bodhi.

            "None," he said, and he didn't sound like he trusted it. Jyn caught his eye and smiled even as she shrugged. Sometimes a plan just went right, but a plan going right never _felt_ right.

            "No sign of Cassian?"

            She didn't think she deserved the knowing look Bodhi cast her way, even if Cassian wasn't due for another planetary rotation, perhaps two if his own travel arrangements didn't go entirely smoothly. She still didn't think that the question was unwarranted. A cargo pilot or a gunner suddenly given a new assignment, a lone droid whose transfer wasn't entirely orderly – none of those were anything out of the ordinary for a beast as big as the Empire, no matter how successfully it managed all its moving parts. An officer being reassigned to a new unit, though, that was something the soldiers who would be following his orders would pay attention to, something that whatever commander gave _him_ orders would note. A flaw in the scandocs the forger had made them, a flaw in Cassian's performance as an officer, either of those things could spell the end, both of their mission and of Cassian. Jyn was right to be worried, no matter how impotent her worry currently was.

            "It'll be fine," Bodhi said, and he didn't sound like he believed that but it made Jyn smile again, just a little and entirely in spite of herself.

            "Did I look like I needed reassurance?" she asked.

            "I do," Bodhi said easily, for all that his mouth twisted as though smoke of the cigarra had turned suddenly bitter. "Maybe you don't."

            Jyn wanted to reach out to him, touch his shoulder or squeeze his arm, and it really was just her luck that the one time she didn't second guess the impulse was the one time when she couldn't risk it, not when they were supposed to be strangers sharing a companionable smoke.

            "Kay should have arrived before any of us," she said. "I'll find him. The first part is all on him, in any case."

            "You don't like that."

            "He's not the best—." Jyn looked at Bodhi and stopped herself, because she could see the places where he was keeping his nerves bundled up tight and raw inside of him, like the most poorly kept of secrets. He didn't need her fears about Kay's ability to pull off subterfuge to add to his own.

            Kay had been Cassian's constant companion for years, through countless missions. She had to trust that he could do his job, the same way that she had to trust that Cassian would find a way to navigate any suspicion thrown his way.

            "It'll be fine," she said, and wrapped those words around her tongue until she could almost believe that they were true, assured, rather than simply possible. "We'll be fine. We can do this."

            They had to do this, and if she squinted she could pretend that _had to_ and _can_ were the same.

 

            Jyn was in her bunk when word reached her that the droid assigned to the general in command of the complex had melted down. _Dramatically_. Actual flames and actual melting might have been involved.

            She'd known that K-2SO was pining for the chance to start a fire.

            It took her most of the rotation to find a chance to slip away, and long minutes to make her way through the complex to the secluded corridor she and Kay had agreed upon, unremarkable except for the computer interface inlaid into the wall.

            He was waiting for her, and probably had been for some time. "You won't be missed?"

            "They have me on _sanitation duty_ ," he said, very nearly prim with displeasure. "I don't believe my absence will be noted."

            "It might be," Jyn said. "I hear that the enforcer droids have been a little _erratic_ as late."

            In any other creature, Jyn might have called the turn of the metal shell of his head _embarrassed_ , or perhaps _regretful_. "An unforeseen consequence. Usually I have Cassian for this part."

            Jyn took a breath. "Well," she said, "now you have me."

            "I’m delighted."

            That didn't really deserve a response, so Jyn turned her attention to the job at hand. Mostly, the job at hand involved her groping clumsily through her memory for the access codes they needed and ignoring the sweat on her palms and the quiet whir of Kay's scomp link.

            "It's done," she said, once it was. She glanced at Kay out of the corner of her eye and couldn't help but add, "Do you think that General Ramda will _like_ the new droid assigned as his aide?"

            The twitch of K-2's hand was dismissive. "I will exert myself to be agreeable."

            Jyn snorted. "I'd like to see that."

 

            Cassian had arrived on schedule, but it took Jyn another rotation and four shift changes before she was able to pry a panel off of the wall on one of the tower's more tucked away corners, just far enough to tuck a piece of flimsi behind it. She hoped that Kay or Bodhi had been given the opportunity to actually talk to Cassian, to give him the rundown of the spots they had chosen for drops, but she resigned herself to waiting if they hadn't.

            She didn't end up having to. When she let herself into the gunboat she had been assigned to midway through third shift, when most of the base would be asleep and those who weren't would already be at their posts, Cassian was already waiting for her.

            "Do I want to know how you got in here?" Jyn asked.

            The corner of his mouth lifted. "You think I've never stolen an Imperial ship before?"

            "I withdraw the question." Jyn stepped further into the cockpit, winding around Cassian when he didn't immediately step back. "I need your help. We're supposed to be running drills tomorrow. I'm not going to pass as a gunner if I hit the wrong button and flush our nav system into space."

            "That's not actually possible."

            Jyn looked at him, her hands resting on the back of the chair at one of the two gunners' stations. "That I think it is should give you some idea of the amount of tutoring I need."

            "I don't know how much I can teach you. We can't leave the landing pad. You can't actually fire the guns, not without raising questions."

            "I don't need to be a good," Jyn said. "I just need to be convincing. For a couple more days, at least."

            Cassian considered her, still and silent by the door, and just for an instant she was acutely aware of how alone they were inside the hollowed out body of the ship, how quiet the night outside was, broken only occasionally by the scrape of sand against sand and against boots as a patrol trudge by. She saw the moment that he saw her looking, and felt that moment catch and hold.

            She wanted to touch him, to reach out and rub her fingers against the stiff gaberwool over his stomach and let that be the first fond memory of a uniform that she had. She thought he would probably let her, if she tried, because he hadn't moved yet, hadn't uttered a sound.

            They had a job to do. Hastily, deliberately, Jyn turned her head and broke eye contact.

            "For a couple more days," Cassian said, and she wasn't looking at him but she didn't think she had imagined the way that his voice went low and rough for a moment before he launched into a quick, thorough explanation of the controls at the gunner's station, like he had found a way to offer the promises they had agreed not to make without ever really saying anything at all.

 

            It went a little something like this:

            Second shift was just trudging off to their bunks when the klaxons started to wail. The emergency lights began to flash seconds later, and all throughout Scarif's tower complex, computer screens flickered briefly as data was stored before shutting down entirely.

            "A level five biohazard has been detected," the intercom announced, the edges of the automated voice disappearing into the blare of the alarm but the words clearly audible. "All personnel are to evacuate immediately. Please proceed to a designated safe zone, and follow standard evacuation procedures until a command is given." There was a short pause, presumably to allow for resulting scramble (only it wasn't a scramble; even in an emergency, no part of the Imperial military would be so undisciplined as to actually run for the exits) before it added, "Thank you," and began to play the message again.

            In the vault at the top of the tower, Corporal Andwane Lof, designation KT-2148, held his weapon a little tighter and felt a little grateful, not for the first time since he had joined the Imperial army and received his uniform, that his helmet covered the look on his face.

            "What do we do?" Dal asked, tugging his own helmet off. Dal was bad about the helmet. He said that the recycled air made him queasy, but Adwane thought he was just vain about his hair. For once, Andwane didn't get on his case about it.

            _I don't know_ was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't say that. He was the one-man for this squad. Their sergeant should have been there, but discipline was lax on Scarif and their last tour had been a hard one; it wouldn't have been the first time the sarg had decided to dodge the doldrums of vault duty to take a nap or catch up on his holodramas. He was still better than their new lieutenant, who had seemed like such a stickler when he had joined the troop at their last posting but had turned into a ghost as soon as his shiny boots had touched the hot sand of Scarif, gone as often as he was there.

            He was the one-man, and no one else higher in the chain of command was around to make the call. Nothing should have taken priority over an emergency evacuation, but they'd had it drilled into them since their first day on Scarif that the vault was _not_ to be unattended. He licked his lips.

            "Raise command on the comlink," he said. "Confirm the evacuation order." It would buy him some time to think, at least.

            Dal did not look pleased at being told to bother the general – or maybe he just didn't want to put his helmet back on – but he moved to comply anyway, his voice coming out rough and mechanical as soon as his helmet was back on. "This is KT-6114, currently on duty in the data vault. Should we proceed with the evacuation order, or remain at our post?"

            Not proper radio procedure, but Andwane wasn't about to criticize, not if it got him out of making a decision. The pause stretched on, until finally he heard, "Oh, no. You should definitely leave. It's very dangerous there, and I'm sure the general would just _hate_ if anything were to happen to you."

            The voice was a droid's, but the words were strange, and for a moment that was almost enough to throw Andwane. Why—but no, the general and his staff would already be making their way to one of the designated safe zones out in the shipyard. Of course a droid would be the one to answer. No one worried about one of _them_ suffering ill effects from a biohazard.

            Dal looked at him and shrugged. Their orders were clear, and Andwane didn't know why he was hesitating.

            They were supposed to guard the vault. Some commanders had been known to test their troops like this, _especially_ when those troops were newly assigned to the base. General Ramda didn't really seem like the sort, but there was no knowing for sure, and Andwane knew his duty. No one would ever accuse Andwane of not doing his duty.

            "You go," he decided. "I'll stay here. That way we'll be able to say that we followed orders _and_ that we didn't leave the vault unguarded." He wasn't happy about it, but it was the best solution, and the only one that would cover all of them if this did turn out to be some kind of trial run of how they responded under pressure.

            He could practically hear Dal rolling his eyes, but when he said, "Always the hero," there was a certain fondness to his voice. Andwane had once spent two weeks in a medcenter after taking a rock to the head that had been intended for Dal, thrown by a local on some dirtball that had barely seemed worth keeping. That kind of thing made you friends, sort of, or so Andwane assumed. He'd never been very good at friends. It was part of why he liked being a part of the army. Here, he didn't have to seek out friends; he had been assigned his squad, and they didn't have to always like each other to be willing to bleed for each other. There was something comforting in that.

            He lifted his weapon in a vague salute as they left, and then settled in to wait.

            The blaster bolt caught him in the side of the head, very near where the rock had once hit. He barely felt it at all.

            Jyn fell into step beside Cassian, skirting around the place where the Stormtrooper had fallen. She heard K-2SO sigh, the metal of the ear-comlink cold and alien and a little jagged where it pressed into her skin, cobbled together thing that it was.

            "I _did_ warn them that it would be dangerous if they were to remain there," Kay said.

 

             "Has _anyone_ seen General Ramda?"

            Bodhi cast a glance at his on-board transceiver, and he was reaching for it before he had even completed the thought, even as whatever beleaguered communications officer was on the other end said, "All pads, please report. I need to locate the general."

            The headset was against his mouth, and he still didn't know what he was going to say, because he _did_ have some idea of where the general might be, but he didn't think that saying _in a heap in his office, probably, if the droid was feeling merciful_ would really—well, that it would really end well for anyone except the Imperials.

            "This is Pad Two, Pad Two. The general, uh, just went by. Just a minute ago, moving fast toward Pad Five." He wasn't sure why he'd picked Pad Five, except that was where the ship Jyn had come in on was docked and it was already on his mind.

            "Pad Five, do you read?"

            Maybe no one would answer. Pad Five's gunner was currently deep in where she shouldn't be, inside the tower. If the pilot—.

            "Everyone and their _cousin_ has been through Pad Five," a woman snapped. "You evacuated the whole complex, what did you think was going to happen? Someone scraped the paint on my boat. I don't really care if it was the general or not."

            —if the pilot was too absorbed with herself and her ship to really care about a missing general, as most fighter pilots were when you got right down to it, then it wouldn't really matter whether or not she was answering her comlink. Bodhi breathed a sigh of relief.

            "I can't believe that worked," Jyn said in his ear. When she laughed softly, it rang hollow with nerves, but Bodhi doubted that he would be able to manage much better under the circumstances, so he wasn't about to criticize.

            "I am _writing you up_ ," said the anonymous communications officer told the pilot on Pad Five, apparently at the end of his tether. "You just see if I don't. Report to the Pad Thirteen, _we are going to have words_." Beneath the pilot's groan, Bodhi heard the officer take the kind of deep inhalation that was meant to be calming before he continued. "What about Director Krennic? Does anyone have eyes on him?"

            Bodhi's breath caught, and any noise that Jyn might have made was too quiet to carry well over the comlink, but he could imagine her echoing him.

            Using the transmitter again felt risky, but he had to do it. "Director Krennic?"

            "He arrived this morning. Dresses all in white, brought a lieutenant and two squadrons of those black-helmeted goons from the Tarkin Initiative with him. Believe me, Pad Two, you'd know him if you saw him. _Have_ you seen him?"

            "No," Bodhi said, against the dusty dryness in his mouth that tasted like sand and Jedha and things that should have been sweet and weren't.

            "I have," K-2SO said, and Bodhi lowered his head, brow pressing briefly against his knuckles and the headset. He knew where the droid was, because he knew where all of them were. Most of the planning stages of their little heist had been Jyn and Cassian, but he had contributed, he had done what he could, and he had been there for every minute of it. Bodhi would stay out of sight as much as he could and make sure they had a way to get off world when they were done. Jyn and Cassian would breach the vault, and Kay, Kay would key in the evacuation order and deal with Scarif's commander before going to stand sentry at the base of the elevator that was the one point of access for the vault, covering their escape and warning them if anyone showed an interest following them up. No one would think it strange; most Imperial droids weren't programmed with much in the way of self-preservation, and it was entirely possible that a handful of them would ignore the evacuation order to complete their designated tasks.

            Bodhi didn't think that Kay was still in the general's office.

            "He's coming up," Kay said. "He's taken two troopers with him, and left the rest posted here. They appear to be waiting for his return."

            "What does that mean?" Jyn asked, and she didn't wait for a response, the moment when she realized that their only escape route had been cut off coming between one breath and the next. "We're trapped?"

            Bodhi wished briefly that the shoddy earpieces provided by the Alliance hadn't been good enough for him to hear how breathless she sounded, the faint note of disbelief in her voice, like she already knew the answer to her question but couldn't yet look at it, or acknowledge what it meant for the two members of their team stranded in the highest heights of the tower. His throat closed, the dull ache of a loss that wasn't yet a sure thing, but which was suddenly close enough for him to see it approaching in the distance.

            "I can distract—."

            "No," Cassian said, sharply enough that it sent a jolt through Bodhi's bones. "Fall back to Bodhi's location, if you can do it without them seeing you."

            "Cassian."

            "That's an order, Kay."

            From what Bodhi had gathered – through observation, through conversation over endless bottles of wine with the rebels who had gathered in the basement to plot – the droid was not particularly adept at following orders, and for just a moment he wished for that disobedience, for guns blazing and a path cut through all resistance, but it wouldn't happen that way, and they couldn't, not this time.

            "It's time to change tactics," Jyn said, and she sounded steadier now, like she had neatly packed up any fear she might be feeling and tucked it away for later. Sometimes, Bodhi thought Galen had not done his daughter any favors by allowing her to grow up into a spy. "We'll worry about how to get _us_ out later, but whatever we decide, we're not taking the plans out that way."

            They had a backup plan, pieced together from Jyn's unnervingly comprehensive understanding of Scarif in particular and Bodhi's experience with busy Imperial shipyards in general. Bodhi didn't like it, but Bodhi had also learned long before he had ever so much as glimpsed Jyn Erso that not liking a thing didn't keep it from happening. He knew what he needed to do. "On it."

            "First," Jyn said, "we'll need to deal with Director Krennic."

 

            One man with a blaster couldn't do much.

            Luckily, one man with a blaster and the advantage of surprise on his side could do quite a lot more.

            The first Death Trooper through the door didn't even have a chance to see where the shot had come from, and the kind of weapon issued to a lieutenant in the Empire's army was superior in at least one way to the antique Jyn had taken from Cassian on Kafrene: it punched through even heavy armor with the same ease that Jyn, clumsy and careless as children sometimes were, had pushed her thumb through the shell of an egg once on the farm on Lah'mu.

            She'd cried, she remembered, even after her father had patiently explained that the egg had always been intended for their table and never would have become a living thing. She didn't cry now, even though she couldn't tell if the shot that hit the second trooper had come from Cassian's blaster or her own – it turned out that a blaster wasn't actually that difficult to use for its most basic function. Point, squeeze the trigger, hope.

            Rebellions were built on hope, or so she had been told.

            She had some pity in her, she thought, and maybe even some kindness, but not in such abundance that she had any left over to share with men with weapons who came to conquer.

            There was only Krennic left, standing in front of them with blaster raised, but he was smiling, faint and condescending and more transparently false than she thought he knew, like she was a half-wild eight-year-old again and not a grown woman with his life in her hands. Like she was her mother, hand on the blaster white with cold and with no one at her back, and him with a half a dozen armored men beside him. Like she had already lost, and was too much the fool to know it. "Come now, Jyn. You know me."

            "I do," Jyn said, and wondered how he could think for even a moment that the reminder that he was known to her would accomplish anything other than forcing her to dwell on how many ways her life would have been different if she never had.

            "Be reasonable," he said, silk smooth and coaxing. "Put down the blaster. We can both walk out of here. I won't let any harm come to you. For Galen's sake. You have my word."

            Krennic kept his word. Jyn had spent years learning what a terrible thing his promises of safety and comfort were. "No," she said, and, "you've lost."

            It wasn't surprising how quickly his smile fell away. It was more surprising that he'd managed to hold onto it for so long. "Oh I have, have I?"

            She could tell him. She _wanted_ to tell him, wanted to crack him open and lay him bare the way that death might not but defeat certainly would. "My father's revenge. He built a flaw in the Death Star. He put a fuse in the middle of your machine, and I'm going to tell the entire galaxy how to light it."

            She saw the moment when it hit him, how little stood between her and victory, and then she saw the moment when he cracked open, just a bit. "Just because I've lost doesn't mean you've won," he said, and she knew that he was talking about the Death Troopers he'd left behind at the tower's only entrance. Krennic knew he wasn't going to walk away from this, but he also knew that she wouldn't, either.

            Jyn looked at him, and wondered at how the monster of her childhood could also be this: pale and desperate, too familiar to hold the shape of her childhood fears in spite of the way that his shadow had hung over her even as an adult. She still hated him, thick and viscous like an oil slick in the pit of her stomach, but she didn't think she was afraid anymore. An enemy backed into a corner was cause for caution, but not fear. "Feels like winning to me," she said, and it felt true when she said it, true enough to paint the ghost of a smile across her lips. Her victories had always been small ones, in a way that a man as ambitious as Krennic probably couldn't comprehend. She hadn't come to Scarif intending to die, but survival had never been a condition that had to be met for her to know that she had won.

            Krennic moved. Perhaps he had intended to shoot her, or perhaps he was just trying to find some new angle of escape, some other argument to throw at her or the words devastating enough that they would cripple her resolve, but it didn't matter, because the blaster bolt hit him in the chest and put an end to anything he might have intended or done, then or ever again.

            (Later,  Jyn would wonder if it had been mercy or pragmatism that had prompted Cassian to shoot, if he had wanted to spare her from making the choice to kill someone she had known all her life in cold blood, no matter how richly Krennic had deserved that fate, or whether he had just seen the risk of leaving an armed man with little left to lose enough time to decide on a desperate course of action.)

            "Should I have let you take the shot?" Cassian asked, as Jyn breathed her way through the memory of a different body, of loamy black earth and green grass rather than the cold gray duracrete of Scarif. His back was held straight and tense. His face still told her nothing, as cool and unflinching as it had ever been when the blaster had been pointed at her rather than at the enemy, but she thought she could read worry in the set of his spine, and that maybe that was good enough for some kind of understanding.

            She didn't know what answer would be true. (Later, she would decide that she didn't care; she had wanted Orson Krennic dead and she had wanted him defeated, but she had never wanted anything else from him, not even the knowledge that his death had been her doing.)

            What she did know was that they had better things to worry about than her anger, and too little time left to waste it on recriminations, if any had been needed. "It doesn't matter," she said, and this time she smiled at him, as small and as bittersweet as their victory was—as it would be. "I probably would have missed, anyway."

            Her knees felt shaky when she stepped into him, and his hand curled lightly around the back of her neck. "That's it," Cassian murmured to her hair, "that's it," but there was something like condolences mixed with the comfort in his voice, something like an apology, before he let her go and stepped away. There was no time to rest, not now, and no time for comfort or regret, not with so much left to be done.

            There was no time.

 

            They sent the plans.

            "Do you think anybody's listening?" Jyn asked.

            "I do," Cassian said, and he hadn't lied to her in weeks so she chose to believe him. "Someone's out there."

            (Bail Organa had promised him it would be so.)

 

            There was only one thing left for Jyn to do, after that.

            Among the documents her father had provided her on Scarif, there had been one in particular that had caught Jyn's interest. The first fifteen lines had been nothing but _caution_ , typed large in red. The sixteenth had been an explanation. The seventeenth had been a twenty character numeric code, long enough that there was little risk of someone entering the correct sequence accidentally, but short enough that someone used to operating under pressure, such as a career military man given command of one of the Empire's archives – or a woman who had spent the greater portion of her life living in hostile territory – might remember it, even in the most dire of circumstances.

            The Empire prepared itself for any eventuality, and that included the unlikely possibility of defeat. No one really thought that enemy forces would be able to take one of the heavily guarded archives that held the most valuable of the Empire's secrets, but that didn't mean that no one had thought to establish a protocol against the day when such a thing _might_ occur. Under such circumstances, it might be expected that the officer in charge would destroy the information he had been set to guard rather than see it fall into enemy hands – although, for a preference, he would do so only after transmitting the data to a secondary location, so that it might be preserved.

            Jyn had already sent the only transmission she intended to send. She punched in the code.

            She wasn't sure what she expected. Perhaps the silent, clean wipe of any computer destroying the data it contained, but of course the data here wasn't stored on a computer – it was, in fact, kept separate from the rest of the complex's network, to prevent the kind of intelligence breach that worried the Empire much more than the possibility of a full-scale takeover ever had. Instead, she watched as the chamber containing the Empire's archive filled with flame, hot enough that she could see the metal of the ladder leading to the tower's roof buckle and warp but eerily silent, the transparisteel guarding the interior too thick for noise or heat to escape. There was only light, blazing white and gold and bright enough that Jyn eventually had to squint and look away.

            The Empire had destroyed her family so that it might find use for her father. It seemed only right that they not continue to benefit from the arrangement.

            "Your father would be proud of you, Jyn."

            "I know."

 

            They could have stood there and watched it all burn, lingered until the armed and armored troopers that Krennic had brought with him grew curious or impatient or concerned enough to risk disobeying orders, but neither of them were really built for waiting on the inevitable.

            Jyn pulled the comlink from her ear and dropped it on the floor. Cassian did the same, and she thought that he understood. There were things that no one needed to hear, and the death of a friend was one of them. He stooped to pick up her abandoned helmet from where she had left it, on the floor beside the console, inches away from what had been the tower's one remaining guard. Once they were on the elevator, he tucked it over her hair. "Just in case," he said, but his smile was wry, because they both knew that a helmet wouldn't be protection enough, not to guard her identity when the presence of an unauthorized officer and ship's gunner in the vault was questioned by men who might have seen her every day for the last year or ten years, and not from whatever would come after that.

            She thought she should offer him something – a farewell, regret for the things that had been or might have been, a kiss to hasten the ones that had come before it on their way – but her tongue felt clumsy and her helmet was on. Instead, she reached out and wrapped her hand around his wrist and the base of his palm, snaked her fingers up under the fitted cuff of his sleeve until she could feel the dull thunder of his pulse against her skin, take what comfort she could from the steady rhythm and offer what warmth she could in return.

            The elevator doors slid open.

            Jyn saw Yung in the moment before they were spotted, her dark head lowered to speak into her comlink, her mouth wearing the beginning of a frown more peeved than puzzled, two squadrons of Death Troopers in neatly ordered ranks behind her, their blaster rifles held loosely in hand, as still and as silent as statues. She saw the moment when Yung noticed them, saw the way her gaze went sharp and hard, and knew that their time had already run out.

            She would have recognized Yung by her silhouette, could have picked her out on a crowded street from nothing more than the way that she walked and the length of her stride. They'd had years to learn each other, no matter how little they'd wanted to, years to leave precise fingerprints on each other's memories. She saw the moment – in spite of the helmet, in spite of the uniform, in spite of this being the last place in the galaxy where Yung should expect Jyn to be – she saw the moment when Yung recognized her.

            The moment stretched, and then Yung said, "Sitrep," in the bitten off and spat out snap of an officer who expected obedience.

            Cassian was quicker to respond, stepping forward with the kind of precision that Yung's voice had demanded, and Jyn realized that he wasn't reeling the way she was because he didn't know, didn't yet understand that they had been made, and that this was not just some stroke of providence that might, perhaps, allow they to walk away unscathed. "We were sent by the Lieutenant Commander," he said, and of course he would have noticed the rank insignia on Krennic's chest and marked down that information on the off chance that it might someday prove useful. "For your ears only, he said."

            Yung nodded, as though she had expected that. "With me, then." She turned on her heel, clearly expecting them to follow.

            There was nothing to do _but_ follow.

            When they were out of earshot, Yung said, cold and crisp, "I trust you have an exit strategy."

            Jyn saw the look Cassian cast her way, and the silent question contained within it. What would she offer Yung? An answer? A blaster bolt to the back as soon as they stepped into some out-of-sight hallway? She went to shake her head, because she didn't know, and then realized it didn't matter if she was unsure how to proceed, because the decision was hers whether she liked it or not. "Pad Five," she said, and hoped that she had chosen right.

            "I'll get you there."

            They didn't speak as they made their way to the tower's entrance, walking through hallways empty enough to echo with the sound of their passing. Jyn pulled off the helmet and let it roll and rattle hollowly across the floor. Anyone who might have recognized her, save the one who already had, was behind them, and she was tired of the sound of her own breathing in her ears. They didn't speak as they pressed through the crowd of evacuees, the look on Yung's face and the set of her shoulders clearing them a path. The silence felt as fragile as the situation, both easily broken by a word spoken at the wrong time.

            "Why are you helping us?" Jyn asked, less because she wanted to know and more because she thought that, if she survived this long enough to look back on today as a memory, she might need to.

            She'd never been good at knowing when to keep quiet.

            Yung wheeled on her, boot sinking low in the sand, sudden and sharp enough that Jyn had to dig in her own heels to avoid a collision. They were deeper into the surrounding jungle, now, on one of the out-of-the-way paths that connected the landing pads to the rest of the complex, leaves as long as Jyn's arm and twice and wide drooping and drowsing overhead. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Cassian's hand twitch toward his weapon, the reflex quickly checked, although his hand didn't move away from his hip immediately.

            "You think I'd rather see you dead? You know better."

            For a moment, Jyn couldn't think of a response, because Yung said the words like they were something obvious, something Jyn should have known, something Yung was sure she did know. She laughed, a little, wild and thin. "You expect me to believe that you'd choose me over the Empire?"

            "I'm choosing nothing," Yung said, her expression fierce and strange, "but I never would have seen you dead," and whether that was true or not, it was clear that Yung believed it to be true, voice pitched low and intense with some emotion that Jyn didn't immediately recognize. "You're _mine_. I practically raised you, you little fool. I wouldn't have let anyone harm you."

            Love, she realized. That was what this was, but it was a terrible kind of love, nothing like Galen's proud affection or Bodhi's careful, undemanding friendship; it sounded too much like possession, like doors closing on windowless rooms. She wondered where over a decade of captivity fit into Yung's definition of _harm_. She wondered how Yung had looked at the shape of whatever lay between them and come away with such a very different picture of what that thing was than the one that Jyn had formed.

            Jyn was used to her own love burning her, to the sting of Galen's turned back and the sick weight of anger and grief in the pit of her stomach when she thought too long of her mother, but she'd never had someone else's love feel more like a burden than a blessing. She didn't know what to do with Yung's affection. She couldn't return it, and she didn't want it.

            Except it might get them away from Scarif alive.

            "I don't like your choices," Yung said, calmer now, "but I want to see you survive them."

            (Love had never felt like a weapon before, like something she could wield to make someone else bleed. Jyn would have preferred a blaster.)

            "Thank you," she said, and tried not to choke on it. When Yung shrugged and turned away, Jyn followed her. She tried to school her expression into something neutral, something safe, but she thought that she probably hadn't been entirely successful from the way that Cassian crowded into her space, close enough for his arm to brush against her shoulder as they walked, offering comfort or protection or both.

            They reached the edge of Pad Five, the sun filtering down through the hole that had been cut through the trees to burnish the smooth, straight lines of the gunboat with gold. Stealing the gunboat had been K-2's idea. If they ended up needing to fight or flee, better to do it in a ship that was equal to the task. If they were able to leave before the breach was discovered, better to do it in a ship that was already cleared to come and go as needed, in the event that the significant defenses hovering outside of Scarif's shield gate required reinforcements. As far as anyone knew, Jyn was assigned to the boat. There was very little _to_ keep her from stealing it.

            They came to a stop. Beyond the curve of Yung's shoulder, Jyn could see Bodhi's face peering out from the open hatch, his gaze flicking between her and his former lieutenant like he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. Eventually he just caught Jyn's eye and said something, and although she was too far away to make out the shape that his lips formed she thought that it was probably _hurry_.

            She could do that.

            She didn't look at Yung as she passed her, Cassian still half a pace behind her with half an inch of space between them, but she did stop when she heard her name.

            "I don't want to see you again," Yung said. Her dark eyes were hard and implacable, and Jyn thought she probably meant this as much as she had meant everything else she had said. If they saw each other, it would end differently, because there was not much room for kindness in all of Yung's love.

            "It's mutual," Jyn said, before she could stop herself, and she heard Cassian inhale sharply, like he too sensed that a wrong word might shatter their tentative peace. She watched the way that Yung's eyes narrowed, and tried again. "You'll be returning to Eadu?" She shrugged. "So that I know where not to see you." If the rebels had succeeded in their mission, Jyn would have no reason – and no desire – to return to the planet that she had called home for most of her life.

            Something flashed briefly across Yung's face, gone almost as soon as it had appeared, something very like pity. "You haven't heard."

            There was ice in Jyn's chest, ice and thunder, a storm hovering just beyond the horizon and brewing somewhere just below her heart. "Heard what?"

            Slowly, Yung shook her head. "You need to go."

            "Heard _what_?"

            "Jyn," Cassian said, a warning in his voice that Jyn failed to heed, just like she ignored the warning on Yung's face, the way her jaw stiffened with resolve and turned her into something as unmoving and unfeeling as the bare rock face of a cliff, transformed her back into the kind of model officer that the Empire might have been proud of, were it not for the way that her fingers rubbed idly against the thigh of her uniform pants as she thought.

            "I said that I wanted you to live," she said, "I never said that I cared if he did."

            Jyn had rarely had the opportunity to see Yung in action, but she still shouldn't have been surprised by how fast Yung could move, so fast, too fast. Her blaster let loose a mechanical growl as she fired.

            Cassian staggered.

            Time sped, and then slowed, blurred together unpredictably. She heard Bodhi shout, and then suddenly he was there beside her, helping her support Cassian, and her fingers were wrapped hard around Cassian's arm, even though she couldn't precisely remember having moved to catch him. Cassian's arm was around her shoulders, and she was using the hand that wasn't wrapped around his hip to grope clumsily for her own blaster when he said, "She's gone, and we need to be too," the words formed carefully around pain.

            They tumbled onto the ship. Kay was already seated in the copilot's chair that had been meant for Cassian, his hands moving through the preflight protocols faster than any human's could have. "You got him _shot_ ," he said, and his dismay sounded sharp and sincere the way that so few of the things he said ever did, even if the metallic click of his fingers against the controls never slowed.

            "Get us in the air," Cassian said, and the door slid shut even as Jyn lowered Cassian into one of the gunners' seats, freeing Bodhi to dash for the pilot's chair.

            They were thirty miles above the ground and rising fast when K-2SO said, very calmly, "They're closing the shield gate."

            Someone on the ground had realized that something was amiss, or perhaps Yung had even told them – Jyn was not so naïve that she though Yung's help had been given without the other woman already knowing exactly how she would deflect blame away from herself. If the alarm had been sounded, then there was no guarantee that the ships drifting peacefully outside of the shield gate hadn't also been informed, and one gunboat was no match for a Destroyer.

            "Punch it," Cassian said, lurching out of his chair and stumbling across the few short feet before he could brace his hand against the back of Bodhi's seat.

            "We haven't cleared atmo—." Bodhi, his voice twisting around Kay's when the droid said, "I haven't completed my calculations."

            "I'll make them for you," Cassian said, and when he leaned past Bodhi to touch the controls his fingers left black-red smudges in their wake, but there was nothing Jyn could do except brace her own hand against his back to steady him as he reached for the throttle.

            Jyn's stomach lurched, and the blue-white blur of hyperspace rushed up to meet them.

 

            "This is it?"

            Lieutenant Yung's fingers skirted easily across the datapad, flipping between one still image and the next. "Yes, sir. A transmission was sent, and it was received. We can't say for certain _who_ received it, but this is the only anomaly I was able to flag in Scarif's records." The corner of her mouth turned down. "What's left of Scarif's records."

            "The same ship," Grand Moff Tarkin mused, his thin lips set in a hard, uncompromising line even when his face was at rest, "logged circling the perimeter of Scarif's defenses three times during the period in which we suspect the infiltration was underway. That doesn't seem like a coincidence."

            "No, sir." When she received no response, she asked, "Do you want me to run it against our databases?"

            Tarkin shook himself like a man coming out of a dream, assuming that men such as him dreamed. There was a rumor that cycled through the Initiative's new recruits ever few years that said he didn't even sleep. The rumor was patently false, of course, but Yung could see why they might believe it. "That won't be necessary. It's a diplomatic vessel. I know it." He turned to one of the men who hovered by his side like a supplicant, for all that he wore the rank insignia of a general. "Prepare for the jump to hyperspace. And inform Lord Vader."

            He waited until the general had hastened to obey his command before returning his attention to her, and the curve of his lips might generously be called a smile. "You've served me well. You've served the _Empire_ well."

            She had allowed the rebel who had stolen from and then destroyed Scarif's archives to escape, but if she had her way, the Grand Moff would never know that. "I only wish I could have done more," Yung said neutrally, and that was as true as anything else she could have said.

            "False humility doesn't suit you, Lieutenant," Tarkin said, the same mild rebuke in his voice that a warmer man might have offered a wayward child. "Not many could have done what you've done." His not-smile widened a hair, and Yung almost wished that he would stop. "He didn't suspect you, not even at the end. Given Director Krennic's paranoia, that's quite the accomplishment."

            She was uncertain _paranoia_ was actually the right word, not when Krennic had indeed had powerful enemies and they truly had been trying to see him ruined. "He suspected something."

            "Which he then sent you to investigate," Tarkin said, and he shook his head. "No, I don't believe I'll given Orson credit for telling you to discover the cause of a security breach that you created."

            "It hardly matters," Yung said. "He's dead now."

            "Killed by Galen Erso's daughter. A pity." Tarkin didn't sound like he particularly believed that. "A pity that you couldn't instill a better lesson on loyalty in her, as well. She could have been an asset. Her presence certainly proved to be of great assistance to you. You never would have had so many opportunities to report on Krennic's progress had it not been for the excuse the girl provided you with for leaving Eadu." He waved a hand. "Not that I'm attempting to undermine your own role in your success, of course. You saw an opportunity, and you took it. You're to be commended."

            There had been a time when that kind of praise from someone like a Grand Moff would have made Yung's head spin. Now she simply said, "Thank you, sir," and began to consider how she could parlay his pleasure in her performance into a more tangible reward. It was a lesson that all Imperial officers learned eventually, even those who had, like Yung, joined up with stars in their eyes and a vague sense of patriotic duty, ready and willing to serve.

            "A pity about Eadu," Tarkin said, and he really did sound like he regretted it this time, the way that he hadn't when speaking of Krennic. He was not the kind of man who liked to cast a tool from his grasp when it might still prove useful. "Still, I suppose there's at least one gain from that sorry incident. You're now a free agent, Lieutenant. I can reassign you as I see fit." He considered her closely, and Yung wasn't so incurious that she didn't wonder what he saw. Nothing, she hoped. Nothing except the loyal officer, without the secret burning beneath her breast. When he smiled, she knew that was all he _had_ seen.

            She had become a very good spy.

            "You did well," he said, very nearly indulgent. "If you were to pick your next assignment, what would it be?"

            She had joined the Imperial Navy when she was eighteen. She had wanted to serve. She had wanted to see the stars. A couple years in training, scores good enough to get on the command track, and for a while it had looked like the stars were within her reach. The future had been laid out before her: a few years serving on space stations and groundside, a few years crawling her way up through the ranks on one of the bigger vessels in the fleet, and her own command before she was thirty. Then she had been tested again, and scored even better that time, and the future had changed.

            Once Imperial Intel had decided that they wanted her, there hadn't been any saying no. She hadn't wanted to say no, not then. But now—Eadu and Krennic and Jyn Erso were all behind her, and she still wanted to see the stars.

            "If I had my choice," she said, "I would serve aboard the Death Star."

            Tarkin almost smiled again, as though he had expected her answer, and the hand he curled around the railing in front of them was possessive. "It is a marvel, is it not?" He pretended to consider her request, but she already knew what the answer would be long before he nodded his assent. "Very well."

 

            Cassian was sleeping restlessly, stretched out on the floor, the jacket of his uniform balled up with all the respect it deserved to serve as a pillow, Jyn's abandoned flight suit draped across his chest in a shoddy attempt on her part at creating a blanket. Beneath the edge of one leg she could just barely see the blue glow of the bacta patch they had raided from the ship's medpac.

            Bodhi settled on the ground beside her, moving stiffly after hours stuffed into the pilot's seat. She could see her own exhaustion reflected on his face. K-2SO moved to take Bodhi's place at the controls, and for perhaps the first time, Jyn was glad that one of them was not susceptible to such silly human frailties as fatigue. He hadn't said anything since they had dropped out of hyperspace, and Jyn thought that he probably still hadn't forgiven her for getting Cassian shot, and that he probably wouldn't forgive her until Cassian was out of danger, if then.

            She was tired, but that wasn't all she was. She felt hollowed out and jittery at the same time, empty and too full, like she was still deciding whether to cave in on her bones or explode out from them. She thought that much of her decision depended on what they found waiting for them when they landed.

            _You haven't heard_ , Yung said, over and over again somewhere in the back of Jyn's head. _You haven't heard_.

            She reached out and took Bodhi's hand, for once not hesitating, and wove her cold fingers through his. He looked surprised, but not displeased, and when he smiled at her Jyn couldn't quite bring herself to share her fears with him, even though she knew that she ought to.

            When she stretched out beside Cassian, she kept hold of Bodhi's hand. She pressed her face into the curve of Cassian's shoulder and breathed in deep, sweat and skin and the sickly-sweet smell of the bacta, warm and alive—at least for the moment. For the moment, in the moment, they were all, against the odds, alive.

            They were all alive. She would believe that until she was told otherwise.

            She had to.

 

            Some things might change, but small truths remained the same. Here are some about Galen Erso:

            One: There was no world in which he would not have willingly died in order to destroy the monster he had helped to create, and,

            Two: He loved his daughter. He would have and had done worse things than die to see her safe.

            On Eadu, the rain almost never stopped. The sky was gray, but where the light pierced the clouds it was green, greener than the sky was on one of the rare, clear, piercingly cold days that came only every so often. Where the light touched the ground, there was gold, and there was devastation.

            On a planet far distant from Eadu, days before she would ever set foot on Scarif's beaches, Jyn Erso still breathed. Her heart still beat. Bodhi touched her shoulder, leaned in to say something clever and distracting, too tentative still for the gesture to be called _brotherly_ , but heading there, almost there, almost like family, and Jyn smiled, brief and open and uncomplicated.

            Galen smiled.

            Three: Galen Erso always died on a platform on Eadu, drenched with rain.

            Four: Some deaths were better than others.

            Five: He loved his daughter.

            Six: He loved his daughter.

            Seven: He loved his daughter.

            Eight: He loved—.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler things for those who are checking the end notes or who have read the chapter!  
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> Galen dies. So do other people, but that's the only one that I think might bother some people, based on things that have been said in the comments. Sorry. If it helps, the fact that so many people were rooting for his survival did make me have a good long think about whether the death was necessary. I also thought about whether a warning was necessary, but again, at the end of the day I don't want to make anyone's fun time stressful, and I know parental death can be upsetting, so.


	8. Chapter 8

            The old stone of the floor dug into Jyn's hips and the back of her thighs, and she could feel the damp of it seeping through her pants, but she didn't move. The joints of her knees hurt from holding the same position for too long, and the snarl of hunger in her stomach was a persistent irritation (and it was wrong, so wrong to be bothered by something as simple as hunger now, even if it had been at least half a day since her last meal, a nutrition bar taken in bites between checking the edges of Cassian's bacta patch and unsuccessfully trying to decode the navicomp's display well enough to guess at their destination). One of her hands was wrapped too hard around the opposite wrist, but she didn't let go. She felt—she didn't feel much, and that was fine, that was good, but she thought that if she moved too much or too fast she might jostle something loose inside her, send whatever was waiting beyond all of her comfortable numbness rushing in to fill the hollow spaces between her ribs.

            "Hey."

            She rolled her head back against the wall until she could look up at Bodhi. He'd spoken softly, like he too was worried about breaking apart if he was too fast or too loud or too much – or maybe he was just hoarse. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. He'd been crying. She wondered when they'd told him, and was distantly grateful that she hadn't had to, even though she probably should have been the one to do it, because she didn't think that she could have held him together when she was one step out of line away from falling apart herself.

            "How—."

            "How do you think?" Jyn snapped, and she felt herself tilt, breathed in sharp and as deep as she could manage to prevent the fall.

            Bodhi flinched, and for a moment he looked indignant, before he visibly worked to bring himself back under control. He sat down next to her, which was more than anyone else had dared in the two hours since she had come storming out of the room in which Mon Mothma, with her terribly gentle voice and her shoulders draped in white so pristine that Jyn had needed to bite back the urge to hate her on reflex, had delivered the news.

            "I was going to ask how Cassian was doing."

            Jyn released the breath she had been holding. "Stable. They have him in a tank now." She looked down, staring at a new scuff on her boot with more attention than it really deserved. "Kidneys don't regrow themselves."

            "You've seen him?"

            "No," Jyn said. "I'm not family, or a designated emergency contact." They'd let Kay in without question, and when he had come back to her to report – briefly – on Cassian's condition, she'd taken that as the clearest and only indication she was going to get that she had been forgiven in some small measure. She didn't think the droid cared enough for her grief to make allowances for it; if he was willing to tell her what was going on behind the closed doors of Yavin's largely improvised infirmary, it was because he had decided she deserved to know. "I don't have any right to be there."

            Bodhi was silent. Jyn couldn't have said for how long. He was also the first one to break the silence. He had never been as good at maintaining it as she was. "I heard one of the—I guess he's a general? I think someone call him _general_. I heard him talking about you."

            "Draven," Jyn supplied. She had met no other generals during her time here, and she imagined that he had quite a lot to say about her, none of it suitable for the ears of children.

            "He," Bodhi said, and for a moment he visibly floundered as he tried to think of some kinder way to phrase Draven's opinion of her, finally settling on, "He doesn't seem convinced that having you here is a good idea."

            Anger flared low in her stomach. Anger had been her constant companion for years, but even it didn't sit quite right tonight, too weak and too wild. She clung to it anyway, because this was the closest she had come to feeling like herself, like she fit in her own skin, in hours. "No one's said anything to _you_ , have they?" Some small, dark part of her hoped that they had. She would have liked the chance to snap and snarl on Bodhi's behalf, even if it would serve no other purpose than to snap and snarl, even if he was more than capable of looking after himself.

            For a moment, Bodhi looked startled, then reflexively pleased, before that too dropped away, leaving nothing but sadness and a bone-deep exhaustion in its place. "No. Defectors aren't uncommon, here. Pretty sure I actually spotted a guy I was posted with a couple of years ago out in the hangar. But you're—you're something different. I don't think Draven much likes _different_." He hesitated, and then added, more reluctantly, "I don't know how things work here, but if he was an Imperial officer, I'd say he was looking for someone to point fingers at and blame for what happened on Eadu."

            "You think he wants to see me court marshaled?" Jyn asked, and the almost-joke felt as wrong as her hunger did, like she shouldn't even be able to pretend at normalcy when so much of the foundation she had built her world on had crumbled under her, like being able to have a conversation was some kind of betrayal.

            Melshi had assured her that the court marshal wouldn't happen. Melshi was dead now, with the rest of them. The Death Star had seen to that. Her father's would-be rescuers had become his victims.

            He would have hated that. He would have preferred that they not have tried at all. Jyn was not so generous as Galen would have been. She would have preferred that they succeed.

            "I think he might want to have you shot," Bodhi said wryly, and she watched with an abstracted sort of interest as her own guilt at being able to speak so normally was mirrored back to her on his face.

            "That seems like an overreaction," Jyn said, and she tried to remember what she had said to Draven during their brief meeting, after Mon Mothma had broken the news but before Jyn had unceremoniously removed herself from the room. Or perhaps _yelled_ was more accurate than _said_ , but still, she doubted that any of it had been so offensive that it warranted a summary execution.

            She thought that she should probably be more worried about the possible repercussions of having annoyed someone who clearly held so much sway in the Rebellion, but she just... wasn't. She let her eyes slipped closed, and when she opened them again, she found Bodhi watching her.

            "We need to get you out of here," he said, soft and decisive.

            Jyn finally released her wrist so that she could wave him off. "The general will calm down," she said. "Or someone will remind him that there are better ways to deal with someone he doesn't like than murder." Maybe they'd lock her up. She could almost appreciate the irony. Her place in the war might change, but the tune remained the same.

            "That's not what I meant," Bodhi said, and even when Jyn frowned at him he didn't look away, or waver.

            Jyn said nothing. She didn't know what she was supposed to say. She didn't know what was expected of her.

            "Do you _want_ to be here?" Bodhi asked.

            She thought about it. She thought about how there was nothing for her to do here, no place for her to redirect her attention, no distraction forthcoming other than lurking outside the infirmary and trying to worry about the living rather than dwell on the dead. She thought about how everything since they had arrived on Yavin had seemed too bright and too loud, how even a droid talking to her or a rebel's gaze lingering seemed like too much, like the gentle press of a thumb against an open nerve – something that wouldn't have hurt under normal circumstances, but nothing about her was normal right now, all of her was broken raw and open underneath the skin, where no one else could see it. "No."

            "Do you want to leave?" he asked, and there was no misunderstanding him this time. This wasn't a question about her preferences, it was an offer, and Bodhi Rook probably was better than she had ever really deserved.

            "Yes."

 

            They sat there for a while longer, talking over their options – or rather, Bodhi talked, and Jyn contributed as little as she thought she could without simply leaving him alone with her silence.

            "We're going to need to steal a ship," Bodhi decided finally, and Jyn just nodded. She doubted it would improve how either of them stood in the eyes of the Rebellion, but right now she didn't care, and her conscience was quiet in her chest. They had bought the Rebellion a great deal more than the cost of a single ship.

            She took one last glance at the door leading to the infirmary before they left, although she turned away quickly when a medical droid old enough that its wheels squeaked every few inches came rolling out. Not quickly enough, because when the droid had passed and Jyn turned back to Bodhi, she found him already watching her.

            "He'll understand," Bodhi said.

            "He won't," Jyn said, because she and Cassian had not shared much about where they had come from, what had made them, but she didn't really think that a man like Cassian Andor had grown out of anything other than loss. "He never ran."

            She didn't—she couldn't worry about that. It was enough that he would live. She only wished that they could wait for long enough to be sure that he _would_ live.

            "Leaving now doesn't mean leaving forever," Bodhi said, and she could hear in his voice that he meant it, that leaving didn't look like something permanent from the place where Bodhi Rook was standing. Even if the Rebellion wouldn't take him back, there was never just _one_ Rebellion, and Bodhi would turn around someday, maybe even someday soon, and throw himself back into the fight. Jyn didn't know how to tell him that she wasn't sure if she would, because even trying to think of the future right now made the ache in her chest move into her bones.

            By mutual, silent agreement, they passed by the gunboat they had already stolen once. It would draw too much attention once they were away from Yavin, and it was, to be honest, probably more ship than a cargo pilot and a woman who had never done more than pretend at being a gunner could handle. The Rebellion would put it to better use than they ever would, and no matter how much Jyn was ready to see the Rebellion and almost everything in it behind her, she didn't want to see it fail.

            She'd done her part. She'd gotten them the plans. Someone still had to take the shot.

            (Cassian was a pilot, and Jyn tried not to think about that. Surely he had done his part already, too. Surely he had done enough, surely they all had—except she doubted that the Rebellion would see it that way, and she knew that Cassian wouldn't, were they to ask him to step up to the line. _He would lie down and die for the cause if someone convinced him there was a battle to be won by lying down and dying_ , Tivik had told her, what felt like years ago, and while she might argue now with his assertion that Cassian was cold, she'd seen nothing since that would make her disagree with the rest of it. Fine. Perhaps it was better that she was leaving, because even if Cassian didn't throw himself up against the Death Star, he would still end up on the wrong side of a blaster again or find some other doomed mission to sign up for, and Jyn had lost enough to this war.)

            "What about that one?"

            Bodhi started when she spoke, even if she'd kept her voice soft enough not to break the night, barely loud enough to be heard over the restless noise of the surrounding jungle and quiet, nighttime sounds of a place with too many people in it to ever entirely be at rest. He followed her gaze to the ship, and tilted his head thoughtfully. "Huh. That's a mining ship. Looks like someone refitted it with laser canons, though."

            Someone had also taken the time to paint a suggestively posed Twi'lek of unlikely proportions across the hull. Another hand had added a crudely rendered blaster to the Twi'lek's beckoning fingers and a pair of ferocious eyebrows to her blue-skinned face, clearly in an attempt to take the ship's mascot from _come hither_ to _come hither so I can murder you_. Like everything else that Jyn had seen the Rebellion use, the ship was old but well cared for, dented and dinged and with a few places blackened by another ship's ion canons, but made to make do because this was all they were going to get. The carefully rendered dancing girl, though, that was something else. Someone loved their terrible, make-do, battered ship.

            Jyn didn't care. She _didn't_. Whoever the ship's owner was, their claim might have been love, but hers was need. "It'll do. Let's go."

 

            "—and I know for a _fact_ that the Merry Widow's crew bunked down an hour ago, so I don't know what you think you're doing on that ship. No one's supposed to be on board."

            For a frozen moment, Jyn and Bodhi both went still, before Bodhi grabbed for the transceiver headset. "Yes, yes we are. They, uh," he met Jyn's eyes, and behind his she could read the blank space where an explanation was supposed to be. "They told me to take her for a spin?"

            Jyn just stared at him. Mutely, his mouth formed the words _I panicked_. Jyn didn't respond, but she did rouse herself enough in the copilot's chair to try to convey with her expression that yes, she had _seen_ him panic.

            "They would _never_. What's your call sign, pilot?"

            "Um. It's, um."

            _"Say something_ ," Jyn whispered.

            "Rogue?"

            Jyn supposed that was accurate, at least. She might have found the energy to make another face, but she saw Bodhi look at her, and she wasn't sure what he had seen but the set of his jaw went firm with some kind of resolve. "Rogue One."

            "Rogue One? There _is_ no Rogue One."

            Jyn lifted a heavy hand to turn off the transceiver, cutting off whatever else might have been said and throwing the cockpit into silence, until the muffled roar of the ship's engines rushed up to fill it.

 

            Jyn didn't ask where Bodhi was planning to take them. She wasn't sure how far or how close they were to their destination when she stood, grabbed the cheerfully colorful blanket that someone had left draped over the back of the copilot's chair, and found a corner far enough away from Bodhi to provide some pretense of privacy.

            The wall she propped herself up against vibrated in time to the ion thrusters, but she thought she could find a way to make the beat of her heart match their steady rumble, and then she would be able to sleep. She wasn't sure if there was anything she wanted to do _other_ than sleep; even her stomach's earlier complaints had ceased.

            She meant to sleep. She broke open instead, and what came rushing out this time wasn't anger, as it had been when she had spoken to Mon Mothma and General Draven. She pressed her spine harder against the wall of the ship and pushed her borrowed blanket against her mouth, breathed wetly against it and told herself it didn't count so long as no one was there to see her breaking.

 

            Some things remained true:

            One: A boy lost his home.

Two: A smuggler gained a job.

Three: A woman with durasteel in her spine and in her soul gave a droid a datacard and a message, and she _hoped_.

            But that's a different story.

 

            The sand was red on Jedha, and the skies were blue. Nowhere Jyn had ever called home had offered blue skies, and Jyn might have envied Bodhi for growing up beneath them had it not been for the solid bulk of the Star Destroyer hovering overhead, blotting out the blue, as gray and as threatening as the clouds of Lah'mu or Eadu had ever been and an inescapable reminder of what the Empire had done to this place, and of all the ways in which a childhood spent on Jedha would not have been only blue skies and red sand for as far as the eye could see.

            There were any number of things that Jyn could have said, once she realized where Bodhi had brought her. Jedha was a warzone. Jedha was under Imperial occupation, and they were still wanted by the Empire, now more than ever. Instead, she said, "I didn't think you wanted to go home."

            Bodhi shrugged. "Sometimes there's nowhere else _to_ go."

            The streets were busier than Jyn would have imagined. She'd never been told much about Jedha (she'd never really asked), but every word she'd ever heard spoken of it had painted a grim picture: the Empire on every corner, rebels in every shadow, and the constant threat of violence winding tighter and tighter until something finally snapped. When she'd thought of Jedha, she'd been able to imagine, in part if not in whole, what that kind of grinding, constant fear might do to a city and its inhabitants – her life had given her at least a rough schematic for what the world looked like when the Empire was a constant presence over a person's shoulder – but she'd forgotten that even in troubled times, people needed to eat, to talk, to breathe, and would find a way to carve out the space to do so, for minutes or days at a time.

            It should have been comforting. In time, maybe it would be, but at that moment, Jyn mostly felt overwhelmed, the same way she had at the rebel base, like her mind wouldn't focus long enough to take in individual pieces of the whole, insisting on presenting her with all of it, all at once, until she had to force herself to look at Bodhi's back in front of her, and trust him to look out for the rest. With her attention fully centered on Bodhi, it was hard to miss the way that his shoulders grew tenser with every step they took through Jedha's crowded streets.

            He led her deeper into the holy city, and up, away from the worst of the crowds and into streets that grew progressively narrower, until they were little more than staircases no more than two people wide carved into the very rock of the plateau itself. It wasn't until they came to a stop in front of a house, one of a dozen nearly identical pourstone houses with little to differentiate them other than the color of the sun-faded awnings hanging over their doors, that Bodhi finally drew to a stop, his tense shoulders rolling forward briefly before he raised his hand and knocked.

            The woman who answered Bodhi's knock was wide-hipped and bird-boned, the angles of her face and her round, dark eyes familiar enough that Jyn cast a glance at Bodhi to make sure that she hadn't imagined the resemblance.

            She considered them evenly for a moment, with an avid, almost hungry curiosity to her gaze but a jaw set as firm as the stone they were standing on. "I told my son," she informed the air somewhere just behind Bodhi's left shoulder, "that he wasn't welcome in my home while he still wore the Empire's uniform." She didn't sound angry, or even like she was aiming to injure, just unyielding, but Jyn still had to bite back hard on the urge to snap something defensive. Bodhi didn't so much as flinch.

            "I could strip in the street," he said, and it sounded like a serious offer, "but it's cold, and the neighbors would gossip."

            "They still haven't forgotten the last time you did it," his mother allowed, "and you were _six_." The edge of a smile had started to curve her previously stern mouth, and when she reached for Bodhi her hands shook. She pressed those hands against his cheeks, rough with the start of a beard even more ragged than the one he had worn when Jyn had first met him. "I thought, maybe, when I saw your face on the holoprojectors in the marketplace, but—." She stopped herself and shook her head. "This is a dangerous thing you've done," she said, and then, "I'm so proud of you."

            When Bodhi stepped forward, Jyn looked away. She might not want to feel jealous, but she felt it anyway, envy slicing cold and needle-sharp through the pit of her stomach and leaving in its wake the realization that this, too, was a shade of something lost, that she would never get to—.

            She sucked in a hard breath, but it felt like the air never quite reached her lungs.

            "You should come inside," Tana Rook said softly, and Jyn would learn in the weeks that followed that she must have been trying to be gentle, because Bodhi Rook's mother might have taught him his kindness but she had also taught him his willingness to choose a path and adhere to it with nothing but the most stubborn, clawing determination, and while she was many things, _soft_ was rarely one of them. "It'll be dark soon."

 

            "Don't worry," Tana said, as she took the bowl of veg-meat stew that Jyn had barely touched, "it won't go to waste." Even if she hadn't said it, Jyn could have guessed as much. Jyn and Bodhi weren't the only occupants of the kitchen. Two girls under the age of ten sat on a worn rug on the kitchen floor, acting out some elaborate game involving a rag doll and a plasto varactyl that looked old enough to have belonged to Bodhi when he was a child. A teenage boy was doing something Jyn couldn't begin to guess at with an assortment of unidentifiable, rusted metal bits in the corner, and he was already eyeing Jyn's abandoned food with interest out of the corner of his eye. There had been another girl, but Tana had shooed her out the door with a murmured, "Your sister will be home from work by now, and she'll be missing you," as soon as Bodhi and Jyn had entered, which seemed to indicate that at least some, if not all, of the children were not actually Tana's.

            Jyn wasn't curious, but she thought she probably should be – should have been much sooner, if she was honest, should have asked more and better questions about where Bodhi came from and what he might have waiting for him if he ever returned there. That, more than anything, was what prompted her to ask, "The children?" as Bodhi led her out of the kitchen.

            He shrugged. "Some of them are family. Some of them aren't. Plenty of children on Jedha with not many places to go. The temple used to take the orphans, but there isn't much left of the temple these days other than the walls."

            "No wonder your mother was so willing to take me in," Jyn said. "What's one more orphan?"

            Bodhi opened his mouth, but he said nothing. He didn't seem to know what to say, and she hadn't expected him to. Instead, he led her into a room, small and dark, with a trunk in one corner and a sleep mat in the other, a portable heating unit set between them. It wasn't much, but after so long spent on the ship and out in the bitingly cold air of the moon, the mat and the heater looked like untold luxuries – and not ones she would have expected, given as space seemed to be at a premium. "Tell me that I'm not leaving some other poor orphan to sleep in the cold," she said, because she—the ship she was able to justify, she had needed it and she had done enough for the Rebellion that she could pretend that it was something she was owed rather than something she had simply stolen, but justifying taking the bed out from under a child's back was apparently still beyond her means.

            "No," Bodhi said, and the way that he cupped the back of his neck could have been embarrassment, or simply exhaustion. "I've still got the one parent." He dropped his hand, and then used it to give her a gentle shove toward the mat. "Go to sleep, Jyn. Everything will be—." He winced, and stopped himself. "You need to sleep."

            "She kept a room for you?" Jyn asked, to buy time for her tired mind to come to a decision about whether she felt worse or better about stealing Bodhi's bed, rather than that of some nameless orphan child. "Even though you weren't welcome in her home?"

            "It's not," Bodhi said, and then he sighed and started again. "I told you that Jedha doesn't love the Empire. Nothing that can be _done_ about it, but everyone here draws their own line about how much of the Empire they're willing to let into their bed. She found hers, and that was me signing up to be a part of it while still living under her roof. She kept a room. She didn't return the message wafers I sent, or the credits. I don't know if she listened to the messages. It's enough."

            "Do you know if she spent the credits?"

            Bodhi smiled wryly. "Principles don't keep hungry mouths fed."

            She wondered if they were still talking about Tana. She wondered why Bodhi had signed up to fly for the Empire in the first place, if it had only been for the promise of a chance to fly _away_ from Jedha, as he had claimed before. She thought that she might ask, eventually, but Bodhi had been right, and she needed to sleep. "Come on. There's room enough for two."

            Bodhi didn't protest, just kicked the heating unit a couple of times until it wheezed to life and reached down to drag his boots off his feet. They settled onto the mat, and Jyn had to roll over until her elbows pressed against the wall to make enough space, but they fit.

            They didn't speak again, and they didn't touch, but Jyn was surprised by how reassuring it was to hear his steady breathing behind her, just as it had been in the cramped quarters of the cargo ship on their journey from Kafrene. It was a small comfort, but it was a comfort, and she would take it.

            She had walked away from Scarif with at least one person who mattered still living, and maybe a second, far away on Yavin. She had walked away with her own life, and she thought—she thought that she still wanted to live. She knew that was what Galen would have wanted. Maybe that was enough, for now. Jyn was used to making do with _enough_.

 

            For a standard week, Jyn barely crawled off of the sleep mat. She told herself that it had all finally caught up with her: the adrenaline rush of being exposed as a spy and her first madcap escape from the Empire, the weeks of planning that had led up to Scarif, everything that had transpired on Scarif and her second, equally mad escape from the Rebellion. She was just tired. Anyone would be.

            It was a lie, but it was a good lie.

            She was worrying Bodhi. She knew she was, and he didn't need her troubles and her grief to carry along with his own, but she just couldn't find the will to _stop_ worrying him.

            At the end of the week, Tana looked at Jyn during one of Jyn's rare excursions from the bed to the kitchen table and said, "We've eaten through my larder. Would you like to come to the market with me?"

            Jyn opened her mouth to refuse, but she was suddenly reminded that she was here on this woman's sufferance; she ate at Tana's table and slept under Tana's roof, and she didn't have two credits to rub together or any favors worth bartering, anymore. Her friendship with Bodhi and the small role she had played in bringing him out of the Empire and to Tana's door might buy her a measure of generosity, but that generosity might also run dry if Jyn didn't prove that she had some use, even if that use was to help Tana carry her groceries.

             "I can," she said reluctantly, "as long as you don't think they'll have any portraits of _me_ on the holoprojectors."

            "They took those down weeks ago," Tana said. "I think they gave up on finding my son here when the searches turned up nothing." She traced her finger across the table, tracking the grain of the worn wood. "We were fortunate, here. My sister's husband's parents weren't so lucky. I don't know what the Stormtroopers thought to find – or thought they had found – but there was fighting in the streets for days after." Her smile was complicated. "Saw Gerrera and his people, avenging the dead. Would that he had such care for our lives while we were still living."

            Jyn looked at her. "Does Bodhi know?"

            "He knows," Tana said, "just as he knew when the Ardroxian flu took my wife, and when my eldest caught a stray blaster bolt during a night out with friends." She smiled that same small smile. "I sat him down at this table and let him chop vegetables with the big knife. We're no strangers to death, here on Jedha, and sometimes having something to occupy your hands helps." She paused, then said, "You don't have to come to the market."

            Jyn's mouth felt dry, so she reached for the mug of caf that Tana had given her. "How much has Bodhi told you?"

            "Enough," Tana said, which wasn't really an answer.

            She had wanted something to do, some other preoccupation to focus on, and it was easier to agree, knowing that she was being asked rather than told. "I'll come."

            The market was still too busy and loud for Jyn's liking, and she started every time someone brushed against her, by accident or on purpose – she would have sworn that she felt clever fingers against her vest's pocket at least once, although the likely culprit was long gone by the time she sluggishly turned her head to look, and she had nothing worth stealing to worry about. Mostly, she hovered behind Tana, watching the way that the rope of hair down her back – still inky black in spite of the fine lines around her eyes – swayed in time with her gesturing hands as she haggled with the vendors, good-natured but firm in a way that Jyn thought her own mother might have appreciated.

            The memory of Lyra bartering with their neighbors lingered, an unwelcome reminder that grief didn't really leave forever, it just spent more time away between visits as the years marched on. She was grateful when Tana turned to her and said, amused, "That's the best price old Peska has given me yet. I should bring you to the market to stand behind me and glower more often."

            "Happy to have helped."

            An hour in the market had been enough to acquaint her with the varied but constant background drone of the pilgrims' prayers, so she couldn't have said what made her half turn when she heard someone behind her say, "May the Force of others be with you." She noted the way that Tana, too, started to look, before checking the motion and returning to her shopping, and any other time, in any other mood, Jyn might have wondered why Tana's face went briefly shuttered and secretive before smoothing back into the faint smile of a woman simply enjoying the day as it came to her.

            At the next booth, Tana settled with her elbows on the table in the shade of the sun-spotted blue awning, the heavy red knit of her shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders against the cold; the man keeping the vegetable stall was apparently a friend of long standing, and Tana was here to trade gossip as well as goods.

            "May the Force of others be with you."

            Jyn's attention wandered as Tana and her friend spoke, and she drifted to the next booth mostly to kill the time, and then onto the next, always keeping half an eye on Tana. Tana, however, showed no signs of being ready to leave any time soon, and eventually Jyn stopped watching. Bodhi's mother would find her.

            "May the Force of others be with you."

            She didn't realize how far she had wandered until someone spoke, off over to her left. "Would you trade that necklace for a glimpse into your future?" She found the speaker with ease, but she hesitated in her response, her tongue made clumsy after so many days of being used so sparingly, and the man – another pilgrim? Or was he one of the locals? – had time enough to add, "Yes, I'm speaking to you."

            His eyes were milky and focused somewhere beyond her, but Jyn wasn't a woman of faith – less of one these days than ever. She didn't believe in blind men touched in some way that allowed them to sense things that their eyes could no longer see. She didn't believe, so she couldn't have said what feeling it was that rose, wild and reckless, from somewhere low in her chest, except that it was more welcome than the haze that had blanketed her thoughts since Yavin. She lifted her hand to her neck and tugged at the leather thong hanging there until the knots loosened, then held the crystal out, letting it dangle between them like a taunt or a prize.

            "I'd trade much more than a necklace to know what's in my future," Jyn said, and she meant it, even if she didn't think the man could tell her anything worth hearing. She didn't know what she was supposed to do. She didn't know what came next, or how she was supposed to keep standing when the ground had shifted beneath her feet. She'd willingly trade her past away, if it meant knowing what to do with her future.

            For a moment, he looked startled, and then he smiled, soft and shockingly gentle. No one Jyn had ever loved smiled like that – except perhaps Galen, when he was at his saddest. Jyn's flinch was as much a reflex as anything, a response to the expectation of pain as much as to the pain itself. For the first time, she noticed the second man hovering in the shadows behind the first, and she wondered if grief had actually dulled her senses enough that she had fallen for the obvious distraction and ignored the obvious threat. She met his eyes, briefly, before his more talkative companion drew her back in.

            "Ah," he said, "but I was wrong. What you have there is worth much more than a simple fortune – and I think you regret offering it, now."

            She did, but she refused to lower her hand. Let him call her bluff or let him fold; Jyn wasn't going to make the decision for him. Either way, it would tell her something, and sometimes having the measure of another gambler was worth more than the loss in the long run. After a moment, he reached out. Jyn held her breath, but he just batted her hand down with his own, his aim unerring enough to make her think that the milky pale eyes might be a ruse, something to add to his mystique and draw in the credulous.

            "I am Chirrut Îmwe," he offered, and she thought that he might be taking _her_ measure now, but she hesitated over volunteering her own name, and noticed that he'd made no attempt to introduce the man still standing watchfully behind him.

            In the end, the choice fell out of her hands, because Tana had caught up with her, half of a laugh in her voice as she touched Jyn's shoulder and said, "Jyn? Where did you—ah, I see."

            "I don't," Chirrut said promptly. There was a touch of mischief in his face, and something as much like despair as amusement in his friend's answering snort. "May the Force of others be with you."

            "Always," Tana said. Jyn couldn't have exactly named the look on her face, except that she seemed pleased, and that mingled with her pleasure was something like pride, like the way she had looked at Bodhi when he had told her that he had put the Empire behind him. Not quite like that, though, because nothing else about the way that she greeted him spoke of familiarity, as if she didn't actually know him at all.

            "These are for you," Tana said, and she reached into one of the bags she was carrying to fish out a packet of ettel nuts. She offered them to Chirrut, even though Jyn was certain that Tana hadn't intended the nuts for him when she had bought them, and Jyn couldn't figure out why she would offer them now, when she had so little to spare and when neither pilgrims nor beggars were any kind of rare sight on Jedha.

            Chirrut reached out and took the nuts as easily as he had swatted Jyn's hand out of the air. "Thank you." He sounded properly grateful, but not surprised.

            (This, Jyn would learn, was what rebellion looked like on Jedha. The Empire – and even the Resistance – looked at Jedha, and when they thought of _rebels_ , they inevitably thought of Saw Gerrera and his people, tough and war-hardened and as well-armed as anyone who stood outside of and against the Empire could hope to be. They weren't wrong, but they weren't right, either, because this too, was rebellion on Jedha: a stranger at the door, with few words and trouble clearly dogging at their heels, offered food and a bed and a blind eye; an elderly couple who might stubbornly refuse to give the authorities information they did not actually have concerning the whereabouts of a distant relation, even if it cost them; a few words traded between old friends in the marketplace, concerning a local boy who was in hot water after his hot head got him into a brawl with an off duty Stormtrooper, and the spice freighter bound for distant stars who was looking to hire on new hands and wouldn't ask too many questions.

            Jedha was a warzone, but Jedha remembered what it had once been: history, living memory, and the only common word between a hundred different faiths. Rebellions were built on hope, and on great acts, but they were also built on _momentum_ , on the myriad of little ways that that one person or a thousand could push back, all stacking up. The truth of rebellion on Jedha was that nearly everyone, from the pilgrims who risked long journeys and the ire of an Empire to pay their respects here to the locals who had stood on hallowed ground and decided to sink their roots deep, was at least a little bit of a rebel. And everyone on Jedha – or almost everyone – had an open hand and a bit of food to spare for the few remaining Guardians who had once stood sentinel over the temple.

            Jedha remembered.)

            Tana nudged Jyn gently with her elbow, and from that Jyn took her cue that it was time to go.

            "You should come back tomorrow," Chirrut said cheerfully. He had already used the end of his staff to crack open the shell of one of the nuts against the ground, and he rattled the packet at her now. "Bring some more of these, and perhaps I will tell you your future then."

            "I don't think so," Jyn said, before she allowed Tana to lead her away.

            (She really didn't think that she would come back. She did.)

 

            News, the kind that was more reliable than anything they could get on the HoloNet, travelled slowly to Jedha, but it did travel, brought by the cargo pilots who still carved kyber out of the old temple – although to what end now, Jyn didn't know – and who might grow loose-lipped after a few drinks in one of Jedha's bars, or by pilgrims travelling from distant worlds, or by merchant freighters and smugglers like the one Jyn had hired to bring Tivik home, who traded in gossip as easily as they did in more tangible goods.

            Jyn heard about the destruction of Alderaan and the destruction of the Death Star nearly within the same breath.

            "Your father was a good man, Jyn," Bodhi said, his shoulder pressed against hers and an open bottle of the wine the locals made by boiling the stinging nettles that grew along the edges of the plateau pressed between their thighs. "I won't let anyone forget that," he added, and she knew that he was still thinking of going back, or of going forward, of finding some way to rejoin the fight.

            "Let him be forgotten," Jyn said. Bodhi cast her a brief, sharp look, and Jyn didn't offer to explain.

            It wasn't that she was ashamed of Galen. She had never been, although she was certain that there were or would be those who thought that she ought to be, who would look at what her father had created and say that it didn't matter what he had intended. It was just that she was protective of the dead, who could not speak to defend themselves.

 

            In retrospect, Jyn was fortunate that when someone finally recognized her as an Imperial defector, they went to Saw Gerrera, and not to the local garrison.

            She did not _feel_ particularly fortunate, but no one ever felt fortunate with a sack over her head and the muzzle of a blaster rifle pressed into her ribs. Behind her, Bodhi was still offering token protests. He sounded angry, but he sounded afraid too.

            Jyn mostly just felt angry. It curled in her stomach, welcome and hot, made her cheeks flush and her pulse throb in her fingertips. Anger probably wasn't better than fear, or the persistent desire to just lie down and let the world pass her by that had colored her first days on Jedha, but she certainly preferred it.

            "Where are you _taking_ us?" Bodhi asked, but it didn't matter where they were being taken, because they were already there, the rifle that had been pushed against Jyn's ribs rapping her hard on the lower back and sending her to her knees.

            The clang of metal against metal, a slow and steady rhythm, and then a voice, hoarse but ringing with command. "Let's see it."

            A rough hand reached into the pocket of Jyn's vest, searched it and then the one on the opposite side until her indentichip was found. It didn't matter. The name on the chip wasn't Jyn's. One of Tana's neighbors had come over for dinner, and before they had left they had dropped the identichip on the table. "Saw your drop this in the street the other day," they had said casually. "You should be more careful. Can't get through a checkpoint without that, now can you?" They hadn't offered an explanation, hadn't said whether they had procured the forgery at Tana's request or whether it was simply a small kindness for a stranger, and Jyn hadn't asked. She didn't even register the name that was read now. She'd used so many over the years that weren't her own.

            The hood came off.

            They'd bound her hands in front of her.

            She had barely a moment to register the shape of a man in front of her, the bulk of him silhouetted against the thin light coming through the window and the dull gleam of metal, before she lunged forward, cold fingers wrapping around the grip of the sidearm secured at his hip.

            It was stupid, recklessly stupid, and Jyn didn't care. (She would; she would care later, when she remembered that it hadn't just been her life she was playing fast and loose with, that Bodhi was there too.)

            Someone shouted, and around her blasters scraped their way out of holsters or raised from where they had been resting in idle hands. Jyn knew that she wouldn't be able to pull the blaster loose in time, and that it wouldn't really matter if she did, but for just a moment she thought that it might be worth it, for the way that the man in front of her went from scowling to a kind of dumbfounded surprise for the briefest of instants.

            "What— _wait_. Wait, you fools, put your weapons down! Put them down!"

            Jyn knew that voice.

            She didn't look away from the man in front of her – she might be reckless and she might be stupid, but she was neither so reckless nor so stupid as that – but out of the corner of her eye she saw Tivik push his way to the front of the crowd, pale and sweating and surly as she remembered him. "That's her. That's _Jyn Erso_ ," he said. "The one who sprung me when the Imperials picked me up on Kafrene. I told you about her."

            Jyn didn't loosen her hold on the blaster. She didn't loosen it even when the man in front of her touched her chin, the heavy fabric of his glove rough against her skin, and tilted her head back so that he could look at her face. She stared back at him, seething and furious and awful, as she always was, as she had been since she was eight, when she had first looked at an enemy's hand offered to her in peace and decided that the appropriate thing to do was to draw blood first.

            Saw Gerrera looked at her, and then he looked at her hand where it was wrapped around the grip of his blaster. She didn't understand the way the set of his mouth softened, just a little, with something that might have been wry amusement, or the way he looked wistful for a moment, like a man chasing after a memory, or a dream.

            "Jyn Erso," he rasped. "You haven't changed at all."

 

            This was what life on Jedha looked like:

            It was helping Tana dice vegetables at the kitchen table, and trying not to flush with shame when Tana laughed, not unkindly, as she bandaged Jyn's bleeding thumb and said, "Who taught you to cook, child?" It was trying to find the words to say that no one had, that they hadn't been given the chance. It was realizing that the Empire had robbed her of more than her family and her freedom, that years in gentle captivity had left her without even the simple skills that other people took for granted, and nearly choking on her anger, because she could break into a heavily guarded Imperial base and beat a man senseless with nothing more than a baton and a few inches of room to move in, but she couldn't even _feed_ herself.

            It was nodding her agreement almost without thinking when one of Tana's cousins saw her teaching some of the younger children to play sabacc on the rug in the middle of the kitchen floor, and mentioned that a friend's wife was looking for a new dealer at the little gambling hall she ran on the other side of the city. This she could do, and even if she had long since realized that Bodhi's mother was not going to turn her out onto the streets for not proving useful enough, she now found that she wanted to be of use. A few extra credits might be the difference between there being bread on the table or none, and Tana deserved that kindness, had earned the right to it.

            It was looking across a table at Baze Malbus, whose name she now had but who she still wasn't even entirely sure liked her, for all that he had been willing enough to accept the meal she had offered to buy with a few of the credits from her first week's pay. It was saying, "No one ever taught me how to use a blaster," and having it feel like a test, less of him than of the edges of her new life, trying to find out what she could ask for and when, if this was what freedom looked like or if the walls of her new cell were just a few feet further out.

            He grunted. "Most of the people who feed us don't ask anything in return," he said, but he didn't stop eating, and Jyn thought that she saw the outline of a smile buried behind his beard and the bite of food he was taking. He chewed slowly, and Jyn waited for an answer, because that hadn't been a _no_ and she didn't think that her being moved to generosity by something other than faith was an impediment, as far as Baze was concerned.

            "You're living on Jedha now," he finally decided. "You should know how to fire a blaster." The next day he took her out into the desert and gave her a weapon smaller than the one he carried across his back. He shoved a stick into the loose sand and put a helmet on top. The blank eyes of a Stormtrooper's visor stared back at Jyn, and she didn't ask Baze where he had gotten it, she just lifted the blaster and fired, again and again, until her hands cramped and her legs ached.

            It was looking at the scorch marks on the sand and the untouched helmet, and feeling as helpless and as furious as she had chopping vegetables at Tana's table until Baze clapped her heavily on the shoulder. "Not terrible for the first time," he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. "You'll get better."

            Life on Jedha was becoming accustomed enough to the pulse of the marketplace that when she saw the vendors dropping the awnings on their booths and the last of the afternoon shoppers ducking into whatever café or storefront would accommodate them, she kept one hand on the bag of pallies she had bought for Tana and the other on her blaster, then wedged herself behind a column that might provide some kind of cover.

            Jyn could feel her pulse in her fingertips and her wrists when the first blaster was fired, and the concussion of the first grenade left her ears ringing, left a red-draped pilgrim lying in the dust not far from her hiding spot, bleeding green from all the places where the shrapnel had struck him. She almost didn't hear the child crying.

            She hesitated, and then, between one breath and the next, she stopped hesitating and moved. She was halfway across the wide, ripped open stretch of the street before she realized she would have to drop the fruit so that she could hook an arm around the girl's waist, too hurried to be gentle, and pull them both behind the scant shelter of the crumbling remains of what had once been a wall.

            It was holding the terrified, weeping girl against her chest, tight enough that they'd both have bruises the next day, murmuring comfort that she didn't really know how to give and that the girl wouldn't hear over the blaster fire. Her hand lifted from her blaster to wrap around her mother's crystal. Another grenade went off, close enough to shower them with dirt and chips of rock from the wall, and she heard the girl scream. When the noise of the fight died down, Jyn didn't trust the silence. She stayed crouched where she was for what felt like days, until she started to wonder if her legs would even hold her if she tried to stand.

            She did manage to stand, although her knees groaned their protest, and when the girl started squirming Jyn released her, watching her streak away like a blaster bolt – toward home, toward someone she recognized in the slowly emerging crowd, maybe just _away from here_ , Jyn wasn't sure. Jyn was shaky with fading adrenaline, but she went to check on pilgrim who had fallen with the first grenade, and ended up ducking to an alleyway with his blood streaked across her hands when she heard the steady thump of the Stormtroopers' boots approaching.

            It was finding someone who both knew where Saw was and was willing to take her to him, because Bodhi was familiar and Chirrut was kind, but Saw would let her yell at him with the weary disregard of a man who had weathered worse storms, and sometimes he would yell back, a reminder that he too had thunder and fury under his skin, even when he had to stop yelling to press the ventilator mask against his mouth and breathe deep and choking.

            "This isn't how you win a war," Jyn snarled, still holding her anger close, her hands still green with blood that was clearly not her own.

            Saw lowered the mask from his face and spread his hands wide. "This is exactly how you win a war," he said, voice gravelly from shouting, from suffocating. "If you don't know that, it's because you've never seen a war won."

            She had nothing to say to that, so she left, ignoring the glances cast her way by Saw's people as she went, some friendly and some decidedly less so. One of the men spat as she passed him. (He had come from Alderaan. Word of who she was had spread. She didn't take it personally, although she thought that he would have liked her to.)

            It was returning the next day with the bottle of nettle wine a customer had tipped her after having a good night at the tables, and sitting in Saw's room in sullen silence, drinking from a chipped mug, until he snorted and said, "You remind me of—."

            "What, my father?" Jyn said, disbelieving, because she was grateful for Saw's temper and occasionally surprised by his willingness to tolerate hers – he had shown her more forbearance than he generally showed people, and she didn't for a minute think that it was for her own sake – but no matter how kindly he remembered Galen, even Jyn could see that there was not as much of her father in her as there ought to have been, when he had been the one to raise her.

            "I was going to say that you remind me of Lyra," Saw said, and Jyn didn't know what to make of that, whether the comparison to a woman she had barely known and would never get the chance to know better was a blessing or a curse. He reached out and took her cup from her hands, poured in more wine even though she hadn't finished her first serving. He nudged her hand with the mug when she didn't immediately take it back. "Come now, child," he cajoled, "are we not friends?"

            She didn't know what they were. He might have killed her the other day. He undoubtedly had killed a lot of people, and not all of them in the service of the Empire. She had spent years searching for Saw Gerrera, and didn't know what to make of him now that she had found him, except that she wasn't always comfortable with how much his rage looked like her own. He'd told her, that first day when they had met, that her parents had intended for him to take her, to raise her if anything had happened to them. She wondered what she would have become if he'd been given the chance, if that woman would have been less or more or just different from the one she had become. "Someone once told me that you don't have many of those."

            "I don't," Saw said, and finally he just lifted the wine to his own mouth and took a sip. "But it occurs to me that you don't, either."

            Jyn couldn't argue with that.

            It was this: taking a canteen of Tana's caf to Chirrut and Baze one morning, sitting with them on some stranger's doorstep and biting back the smile that wanted to form when Chirrut took the canteen and said, "And weren't you just wishing for something warm to drink? The Force provides," in a way that was clearly meant to be baiting, and Baze made a rude noise and replied, " _She_ provided, you fool."

            "No, I'll take it," Jyn said, "I've never been an agent of divine intervention before." She bit back another smile at the conspiratorial grin that Chirrut sent in her direction. She watched as he took the cap off the canteen, a wisp of steam and the smell of Tana's good strong caf escaping into the bitingly cold air, but he didn't drink. He offered the canteen to Baze first, and Baze reached out, his fingers lingering on the back of Chirrut's hand for a moment too long for it to be unintentional before he took the canteen and tipped it against his lips. Jyn felt a pang of—something, watching them. Not the sharp-sad envy of watching Bodhi with his mother, that longing for something that would never be again, but perhaps a different kind of longing. Longing for a _might have been_ , for a _maybe_ , for a _we can talk about it – after_.

            They never had.

            It was realizing that the nights had been getting cold, if even Baze was willing to pine at the thought of having something hot in his stomach, and that Bodhi had recently mentioned that winter was on the horizon. Having survived summer, spring, and autumn on Jedha, with chapped lips and hands so dry they bled, blankets piled high to stay warm enough to sleep, Jyn didn't like to imagine what winter was going to be like, especially for two men who she had never seen stand under a roof for more than an hour at a time.

            "I've been thinking of getting my own place," she said, although she hadn't been, and hadn't known she was going to say anything at all until the words were on her lips. They were both looking at her, and she shrugged, suddenly awkward. "Might be easier if there's someone other than Bodhi to split the cost with." She didn't doubt Bodhi would come with her, she just doubted that he would stay for long. He'd been restless, recently. She didn't begrudge him wanting to go, but she thought – selfishly – that watching it happen might be easier if she wasn't coming home to his mother's too-similar face, or to an empty house, just her alone with her thoughts.

            Baze grunted something that might have been agreement, and Chirrut tipped his head back, a faint smile on his lips, and made some joke about Baze being a delicate desert bloom who couldn't weather the cold, and that seemed to settle it.

            It was also this: standing on the edge of the roof of a house that Tivik's sister had found her, which was marginally less shabby than Jyn had expected anything they could afford to be, listening to Bodhi swear at the ancient heating unit inside like that alone would make it cooperate, and taking what felt like her first full breath since she had stepped out onto Jedha's red sand almost a year earlier.

 

            This was what rebellion on Jedha looked like:

            It was spotting an Imperial pilot sitting in the corner and nursing a drink when she came on shift – a rare sight, since the gambling hall, too modest to even earn the word _casino_ as a joke, was patronized mostly by locals and the crews of the merchant vessels that passed through Jedha, the occasional off-worlder who couldn't leave their vices behind even when on pilgrimage. It was making sure that she was assigned to a table with her back to them, because even if months had passed she was wary of being recognized.

            It was watching as Bodhi's eyes kept straying over her shoulder when he came by to idly play a couple of hands with her during a lull, until Jyn finally said, "You can't."

            Bodhi looked at her, jaw set, and she knew that he'd seen the way that the woman had been drinking without seeming to taste what she drank (which was, admittedly, the only sensible way to drink here), the way that she waved off every attempt that the hall's other customers made at offering her company. "I know that look," he said.

            "You're a wanted man," Jyn reminded him. "She might know that."

            "She might," he said, but then he shrugged, "and she might care, and if she does, we'll handle it. But where would I be now if Galen had never taken the time to talk to me?"

            Jyn flinched, and the argument died on her lips. She watched out of the corner of her eye as Bodhi approached the other pilot, watched him take a seat. She watched as they sat there until it was time to close, Bodhi doing most of the talking but the woman watching him with more intensity than Jyn thought that someone with gray in her hair and a flight sergeant's rank plaque might usually give to a supposed civilian nearly half her age. She never stopped watching, and if she was being honest, the house had lost more than it should have by the time they closed for the night.

            At the end of the night, the woman left. She tipped heavily, and she took with her the location of one of Jyn's dead drops.

            (There would be others: a few Imperials thinking of defecting, mostly brought to her by Bodhi, because Jyn couldn't look at them and think that they might be worth the risk, and a few youngsters who talked about getting away from Jedha who she could, because she looked at them and saw Bodhi. The Rebellion might not have been perfect, but it was better than the Empire. Jyn never knew if any of them made it to the Rebellion, but she hoped, she really did.)

            It was Jyn finding the boy who had been piecing together bits of scrap in the corner on Jyn's first night on Jedha in Tana's kitchen again, his expression determined and the thing taking shape beneath his hands more clear, clear enough that Jyn could see what it would be. She settled herself into the chair across from him and said, "If you blow up Tana's kitchen, no one's going to be happy about it, least of all you."

            He cast her a look from beneath heavy brows, eyes dark and serious. "Nothing's going to blow up that I don't want to blow up," he said, and he sounded very sure. He turned his gaze back to his work and added, "My dad was a sapper during the Clone Wars. I know what I'm doing."

            Jyn didn't miss the significance of the word _was_. She wondered how fresh the loss was, if his father had lived long enough to pass on what he knew to his son.

            There were always little rebel cells springing up on Jedha, although the Empire usually stamped them out within a year or two. He would find one of them eventually; he was angry enough for that.

            He was sixteen, maybe seventeen. Jyn hadn't been much older than that when she had started spying for the Rebellion. She understood needing to fight, and she understood that even the children weren't spared the realities of war on Jedha. She sent him to Saw, and tried to pretend that it hadn't just been the best of some bad options, and that the choice didn't give her some restless nights, after.

            (He settled in fine, and he seemed happy when Jyn saw him during her occasional visits to Saw's base in the catacombs. A few months later, Saw would look at her with narrowed eyes and say, "He's the best sapper I've ever had, but he's _very_ choosy about where he puts those mines. Your doing, I suppose?"

            "Maybe he's just reluctant to blow up people he might know," Jyn said, and mocking Saw was no safer than shouting at him, but discretion had never been something that came naturally to her, and it had been one of the first skills she had learned as a spy to be abandoned. "Teenagers can be very unreasonable."

            "Maybe he had better learn to be more reasonable."

            "Maybe _you_ had better learn to be more choosy about your targets, if you want to keep your best sapper."

            It hadn't been her plan when Jyn had sent the boy to Saw, but Jyn was fine with Saw assuming that it had been.)

            Rebellion on Jedha looked like this: vendors in the marketplace pretending that they had never seen Jyn's face before she had come to live with Tana Rook. The dull crack of Chirrut's staff splitting a Stormtrooper's helmet the first time one of them recognized Bodhi on the street. Baze pushing Jyn behind his bulk when an officer with the local garrison went walking by, and Tana pushing her and Bodhi both into a hidden spot beneath her floorboards that looked like it had been used for this purpose before when the troopers went door to door, searching for some other fugitive, some other person who had earned the anger of an Empire.

            It also looked like this: Jyn settling herself into a chair on the outdoor patio of a café just after daybreak one morning and bolting down a cup of caf before signaling for another, because she had gotten off her shift later than expected and Tivik's sister had a house she thought Jyn might want to see.

            There was a group clustered at the next table, most of them older than her, all of them with the look of locals. They spoke quietly, but Jyn was a practiced eavesdropper.

            Her fingers tightened around her cup, and she had to sink her teeth into her lower lip to keep from speaking.

            Jyn didn't really care that they were planning to break into the moon's Imperial supply yard. She was sure that they had their reasons, and if they succeeded it would be a triumph to match any that Saw had won against the Empire on Jedha. It was just that they weren't _going_ to succeed. Their information was bad, or out of date, or maybe just incomplete, but regardless, they were going to get caught.

            It wasn't her problem.

            She didn't want to be involved.

            She was—almost certain that she didn't want to be involved. She'd come to Jedha because she had done enough, and because the fight had taken enough from her, had taken the fight _out_ of her.

            She wasn't sure why she could feel the blood buzzing in her veins, why her mind was already whirring, figuring out avenues of attack, escape routes, what she would need to make it all work. She wasn't sure why she was twisting in her chair, her cup of caf forgotten, ignoring the way the table behind her went silent and the suspicion in the eyes that turned her way, one hand already outstretched. "I'm sorry, just—can I?"

            It was the wrong way to start, and she could see that in the way their mouths hardened, the way that one of the women had already started to tip her drink toward the sheet of flimsi spread out on the table between them. She took a breath, and tried to think about how she would say it if she was Bodhi, always so soft and earnest when he saw someone standing in the same place that he had once stood, giving them the push they needed to take that final step away from the Empire. She thought about Cassian, the few brief glimpses she had caught of him at his most coaxing, the way he must have used that in the past to charm potential assets into trusting him, the ones who didn't skip that step by tracking him down in dark alleys and demanding that he let them spy for him.

            "May the Force of others be with you," she said, because she'd been on Jedha long enough to see how even the least devout of the locals found those words comfortingly familiar, and she didn't believe the words herself but she almost meant them, meant _let me help you_. "I overheard." She had Saw's name to barter with, and Tana's. Saw's was more widely known, but Tana's was better liked; she'd never met anyone in her time on Jedha who didn't at least respect Tana. If they knew her name, it might buy Jyn a little bit of the trust she needed. "I'm not from around here, but I'm staying with Tana Rook. I know a little bit about Imperial bases. Can I?"

            The debate that followed was mostly silent, made up of glances and frowns and shrugs, and Jyn caught the way that almost every set of eyes turned to the man sitting on the far side of the table at least once. He was about her father's age and broad through the shoulders, his hands callused and scarred like a man who worked with them. He kept his arms crossed over his chest all through the wordless conversation, and he never looked away from Jyn. "Give it to her," he said eventually, and suddenly Jyn had a sheet of flimsi in one hand and a stylus in the other.

            She scrounged through her memory for the map marked _Supply Depot - Desert_ , filled in the prefab checkpoint that had been added to even the oldest Imperial installations after a similar raid had liberated two months worth of rations from a base on a planet halfway across the galaxy from Jedha, tweaked the path that a patrol would take near the quartermaster's office. She checked her work, and then she handed the modified map back. The group's leader took it and looked it over briefly before placing it in front of one of the women, who immediately started scribbling notes along the edge of the sheet. "Thank you."

            Jyn was already turning back to her caf when he said, "Did you want a cut?"

            She went to say no, but then she remembered that here on Jedha, she was responsible for more than herself. Tana had children to feed. Jyn would soon have a household of her own. Even the rebels in the catacombs could always use some extra supplies. "I wouldn't say no."

            He was studying her as intently as his companion was studying the map. "Did you want _in_?"

            No.

            That was a lie. Yes. She wanted to pull a chair up to the table, duck her head in low next to the woman and add her own notes to the map's margins. She wanted to be there when they breached the supply yard. She wanted to fight, and she wondered if she had ever stopped wanting that, or if she had just let it burn low for a while.

            This was such a little fight, so insignificant compared to funneling information to the Rebellion, to stealing the plans for the Death Star—except it wasn't, not to the people sitting at the next table. She flexed her hands, and thought about it.

            "Yeah," Jyn said, and stood so that she could hook her fingers through the rail of her chair, drag it closer. "Yeah, I do." A smile curled her lips, what felt like the first one she hadn't second-guessed since stepping out beneath Jedha's blue skies almost a year earlier.

 

            It took the Rebellion over a year to catch up with Jyn. By the time they did, she'd been expecting it for months. Bodhi had sent them half a dozen Imperial defectors, and Jyn had sent them another half dozen young Jedhans, chafing for direction and an escape in equal measure. She was sure that someone was still checking her dead drops, and equally sure that one of the new recruits she had sent the Rebellion would eventually let slip that Jyn was on Jedha.

            She still wasn't expecting to find Cassian sitting in Tana's kitchen when she showed up to deliver some of the take from the raid on the supply yard, a cup of water in front of him and Tana standing over him, looking tired and also very much like she was considering beating her unwelcome guest to death with a skillet.

            Something wild and joyful burst in Jyn's chest, so sudden and strange that it was almost uncomfortable, because she had felt a lot – too much – in the past year, and not all of it had been bad (Chirrut teasing her into a better frame of mind, Baze's steady, calm satisfaction at her progress with the blaster, even shouting at Saw until she was hoarse and too rung out and tired for sadness – and Bodhi, constant and comforting, the only one who understood some measure of what she had lost), but she was no longer accustomed to the way that happiness could blaze as fierce and as bright as anger. She had put down the sack she was carrying and taken half a step forward before she registered how reserved Cassian looked, almost wary, with no answering smile on his lips, and she remembered that they hadn't parted on the best of terms. Hadn't parted at all, really.

            The joy flared out as quickly as it had come, and she shoved her hands into her pockets. "I'm glad to see that you're," _all right_ , she was going to say, but she didn't actually know if he was, didn't know _how_ he was, and didn't know if he would be willing to tell her. "Alive," she settled on, because that part was indisputable, and she _was_ glad to see it.

            She was glad to see _him_ , which was foolish, when she'd already known that the feeling wouldn't be mutual, had told Bodhi as much before they had even left Yavin.

            "You know this man, Jyn?" Tana asked. She made no move to put down the skillet.

            "I do," Jyn said, and the look she cast Tana was questioning.

            It was Cassian who answered the unspoken question. "I asked her where to find you. We've been here since last night. I've interrogated prisoners who were more forthcoming."

            Jyn tried to imagine what that conversation had looked like, and almost choked on a laugh, until she remembered the elderly couple who had died in the search for Bodhi, and then suddenly Tana's unwillingness to reveal Jyn's location was less funny. "You should have sent for me," she told Tana. "Me or Bodhi. We would have come."

            Tana met her eyes steadily. "I know. That's why I didn't." Finally, she set down the skillet, and she stepped toward the kitchen door. "I'm sure you have much to discuss."

            Jyn murmured her thanks and waited until Tana was gone before returning her attention to Cassian. "I should have known that you would come here," he muttered, and for a moment he frowned, sharp and discontent. Jyn's fingers twitched in her pockets, but she kept her hands safely tucked away.

            "Why are _you_ here?" she asked, mostly to keep herself from asking if he had looked, as she had once before, pitiful as a child seeking reassurance that she had been missed, that her absence hadn't gone completely unnoticed. She didn't realize how it would sound until his expression once again went so carefully blank that it had to be intentional, the corners of his mouth turned down only because that was what his face looked like at rest.

            "For the Rebellion," he said, and of course that would be his answer; she never should have expected anything else, and she hadn't, not really. "We need to talk."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What? This was supposed to be the last chapter? Are you sure? I don't know, I can't think of a single reason why I would break my flawless streak of forever failing to correctly estimate how much I can do in a single chapter.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Star Wars Day!
> 
> There are now ten chapters, but theoretically the last one will be up ~~later today.~~ this weekend.
> 
> Please note the rating bump that I have probably not done anything to earn. I tend to ere on the side of caution.

            The sun was higher in the sky by the time that Jyn led Cassian back out onto the street, but not by much; it might be true that they needed to talk, but Jyn was reluctant to do so in Tana's worn and comfortable kitchen, where at any moment a pack of children might come galloping through or a neighbor might appear with the day's gossip, or a therma-slice Tana had agreed to fix for them, or a coat they had let the seams out on for her.

            Besides, she was—protective, of the life she had built on Jedha. It wasn't peaceful or easy, because no one's life was in the holy city, but it was hers. Coming here had been a necessity, but once she had made enough credits to pay her way onto a ship, she'd had a choice in whether or not to stay, the first choice of the kind that she'd ever been permitted to make. She could have gone somewhere safer, somewhere further from the eyes of the Empire, even if there was no real outrunning the Empire. She'd chosen Jedha. She'd chosen Chirrut's faith and Baze's steadiness, Saw's fervor and Tana's particular brand of pragmatic kindness.

            _Everyone here draws their own line_ , Bodhi had said, her first night on Jedha, and he'd been talking about the Empire, but Jyn thought that in her case, it might apply to the Rebellion, too. She had yet to decide how far she was willing to let them into her bed, and until she decided, she didn't want them in Tana's busy house, or her own quieter one closer to the city's walls.

            She thought that she might have let Cassian into her bed – figuratively, literally – but he'd already made it clear that the Rebellion was all that had brought him to Jedha.

            A shadow snaked its way across the street, and Cassian tilted back his head and shaded his eyes so that he could watch the cargo ship's progress as it passed overhead. Jyn watched him instead of the ship, and for just a moment she thought _look at me_.

            The moment passed, and Jyn rolled her shoulders like she could shake off the last lingering trace of wistfulness with it. If she had a few regrets about the shape her new life had taken, she also had the reassurance of knowing that, given the choice to steal the ship and leave Yavin again, she'd do nothing differently. "I hope I didn't cause you any trouble," she said, and immediately regretted the words.

            The corner of Cassian's mouth tilted up in a wry smile. "When have you caused me anything else?" he asked, and maybe he realized how that sounded or maybe he caught the way that Jyn pushed her teeth together to keep from flinching, because he continued more brusquely. "There was no trouble, unless you count a few hours of wondering if your friend would cook breakfast with the same skillet she used to beat me to death."

            Jyn had been talking about her departure from Yavin and from the Rebellion, not about his arrival on Jedha, but she let it stand. "She would have," she said said, "but she would have washed it first." Tana kept a very clean kitchen. "She wasn't going to beat you to death, though. She keeps a blaster in the kitchen."

            Cassian didn't seem surprised. Jyn hadn't been, either, the first time she had gone to get a bowl from the cupboard and found a fully loaded blaster instead. Lyra had kept one tucked in among the serving spoons. It was enough to make Jyn wonder what Cassian's mother had been like, and where she had kept her emergency sidearm hidden, but she doubted she'd work up the nerve to ask.

            Jyn started walking, and Cassian fell into step beside her, following Jyn's lead even though Jyn had no particular destination in mind. "I'm surprised you knocked on Tana's door," Jyn said. "Tivik knows where to find me."

            She didn't need to ask how he'd known where to find Tana. Using Bodhi's name in the marketplace would not have yielded much more than blank looks, some almost convincing head scratching, and a few muttered rounds of _Rook? Rook you said? Roooooook. Peska, have you heard of a Rook from around here? No, me neither_ , but Cassian had a knack for making himself persuasive, and for finding people willing to be persuaded. Someone would have given him Tana's direction eventually and left her to judge whether this stranger seeking her son was friend or foe.

            "Tivik? I'd swear I don't know anyone by that name," Cassian said dryly, "or he'd swear he didn't know me. Or he'd just swear, and run in the other direction."

            "He ran?"

            "He yelled _you'll never take me alive_ first."

            Jyn might have laughed, but she didn't think Cassian was joking. "He—." Jyn bit off what she had been about to say. Cassian was too good a spy to have approached Tivik anywhere one of Saw's Partisans might have seen; there was no point in asking about that. Maybe Tivik had finally just decided that spying for Cassian carried with it too many risks – doing so had gotten him caught once, had nearly gotten him killed, and Tivik was not a man overburdened with courage – but Jyn didn't think so. She thought that he had run because he'd known that Cassian would ask about her. She thought that he had made the decision not to give her up, the same way that the vendors in the market would have found their memories suddenly and inexplicably hazy when Cassian asked them about Bodhi, and something warm lodged itself beneath Jyn's ribs, made her look down at the dirt of the road and smile foolishly until she caught herself and forced her mouth to do something less revealing.

            She probably still looked a little too pleased with herself, because when she looked up Cassian was watching her, his expression wry. "You could look less happy about having stolen my informant."

            "I couldn't."

            "Not a good quality in a spy."

            "I'm not a spy anymore, am I?"

            She watched as even the faint smile that had been curving Cassian's lips faded away, leaving him distant and solemn again. "You wouldn't be the first one to decide that you're tired of fighting," he admitted, "but I always thought you liked the fight."

            There was truth in that, enough that Jyn didn't protest. She thought that was perhaps why she'd spent months pushing at the edges of Saw's temper, just to see what it looked like when he pushed back. "Maybe I found a different fight," she said, thinking of maps and blasters and the bag she had left sitting on Tana's kitchen floor, full of stolen nutrient paste that might keep Bodhi's mother and her charges fed through a lean month or two. Maybe not a different fight; the enemy was the same. Maybe just a different reason to fight, or a different cause to fight for.

            "The Rebellion could still use you," Cassian said.

            "Yes," Jyn said, and her voice sounded cold and brittle in her ears, "I know they could." She'd led him to the marketplace without realizing it, not far from the place where Chirrut and Baze spent most of their days, Baze waiting for work to find him and Chirrut waiting for—Jyn was never quite sure, except that one day he had found her, and decided that she was worth keeping, even though she could think of few things he wanted that she was able to provide, other than the occasional packet of ettel nuts and the offer of a home that she had needed more than he or Baze ever had.

            Over Cassian's shoulder, Jyn could see one of the Decraniated step through the low-hanging door of a hotel that catered to Jedha's many pilgrims, and she had always found them unnerving to look at but it was easier to rest her gaze there than it was to look at Cassian when she said, "I think I've been used enough. I didn't claw my way out of the cage the Empire put me in only to go looking for a new one."

            It wasn't fair. It wasn't even accurate. If Cassian was here on behalf of the Rebellion, it meant that Draven's temper had cooled, or that his temper had been unable to sway whatever other authorities gave the Rebellion its direction. She wouldn't be walking back into captivity if she returned. She waited for the inevitable protests, for the recriminations, but they never came. When she dared to look at Cassian, the set of his mouth was pinched with displeasure, but there was something else in his eyes. Resignation, perhaps. Perhaps understanding. Jyn couldn't have said.

            "I know," he said, and then he shook his head. "Even if you've decided that the Alliance isn't where you belong, you said that you were an ally once. Is that still true?"

            Jyn considered him for a long moment, and considered what answer she might give. In the end, honesty won out. She thought that she might have broken whatever had once been between them, unspoken if only barely, but surely they could still do this: try to be honest, try to be kind, even if neither of them were really built for honesty or kindness. "I might still be _your_ ally," she offered, and it wasn't much to offer, but it still left her feeling wide open and vulnerable in a way she didn't like, like standing in the middle of a blaster fight with weapon lowered and arms spread, just waiting for the shot.

            He was watching her closely, and it was wrong that she had missed having his attention enough that she was glad to have it now. _Look at me_ , she had thought, and more the fool was she for not realizing what it meant that she still wanted him to look, even when she had been the one to leave, even when she was certain still that leaving had been the right decision. Her mother had taught her to know what she was willing to walk away from, but she'd never given Jyn any lessons on what to do if she found that the walking pleased her less than she had initially thought. Maybe that had been the point. Maybe Lyra hadn't wanted to raise a daughter who was reckless or thoughtless enough for regrets. Maybe Lyra just hadn't intended for her daughter to end up in a situation where she had to walk away from something she wanted, no matter what she chose to keep and what she decided to let go. Jyn wondered if Lyra, clever and brave and exiled and hunted, had ever had any regrets of her own, if she'd loved Galen but still sometimes wondered about the life she might have had without all the ugliness that had come with staying by his side. Jyn supposed she would never really know.

            "I didn't want to come here," he said, and the fact that he said it like it was half of an apology and clearly didn't mean it to hurt didn't keep the words from stinging. "I wouldn't have, but there are still things you know that could help the Rebellion."

            She was sure he was right. Even if the Resistance wasn't looking for some specific piece of knowledge she might have gleaned in her time with the Empire, there were still things she knew that they would find useful. Years worth of memorizing maps and schematics under Galen's tutelage, information that she had gathered but never been able to pass on to the Rebellion because her trips away from Eadu had been so erratic, much of it undoubtedly out of date and functionally useless now but some of which might still be worth having.

            "I can give you what I have," Jyn said, and she turned to take them away from the marketplace, back up through the winding streets and staircases of Jedha that would lead her home, or to the closest thing she had ever come to having a home.

            "I'd rather have you," Cassian said, and something about the way he said it almost allowed her to imagine that he meant her, just her as herself and not as a tool to throw against the Empire and see which one cracked first. (Her, it would be her, because Jyn was a weapon but the Empire was a monolith, and no single weapon was going to do more than pry a few loose pieces off and hope that would pave the way to success for the next person who tried their luck, and the next, and the next.)

            That would still be how she ended, she thought. They wouldn't see the Empire fall in her lifetime, and she'd still die throwing herself against it, prying loose the pieces. She wondered if her parents had seen their own deaths with such clarity, if Lyra had known that she would die for stealing Galen away from the Empire or if Galen had known that the thing he had built would kill him – she thought he probably had, for all that he had fed her bites of hope about daring rescues and the opportunity for forgiveness. If that was how she ended, though, she would make it _her_ end, the same way that Scarif might have been: a mission of her choosing, and the decision to paint a target on her back one that she had made, rather than one made for her by someone else or by circumstance.

            There were things to admire about the Rebellion. There were things that made her want to go back. But Jyn had already picked the ground that she would stand and fight on, the skies that she might be willing to bleed under.

            "But I'll take what I can get," Cassian said.

 

            Not much later, Jyn found herself sitting at the table that Baze had slapped together using the end of his blaster, a tube of flexi-paste, and pieces of the twisted, scrubby uneti trees that still grew in a few places, deep in the desert. It wobbled a little when Jyn put the datapad that Cassian had handed her on the edge, and Jyn hesitated. "If I give you what I have," she said, the words coming slowly to her reluctant tongue, "what do I get in return?"

            _To know something is to be invaluable—indispensable_ , Galen had said, in the last message he had ever sent her. _I have made you into a weapon, but I have made you into a weapon too keen and too deadly to be easily thrown away. I hope that your friends in the rebellion will remember that, when the time comes._ She'd thought then that he meant for her to barter knowledge for his liberation, but now she wondered if he had foreseen the possibility that she would need to barter her knowledge with the Rebellion the same way he had his with the Empire, leverage what she knew against what they had.

            Everything Jyn had ever had that was worth keeping had been bartered for, or stolen. (Or given, like an unasked for gift, but that was rarer and more recent, and she doubted that Cassian was in any mood to be generous right now.)

            He went still across the table, fingers wrapped around the cup of chav tea she had brewed him because Chirrut preferred it and Bodhi still hadn't gotten around to replenishing their caf supply. "I've been authorized to negotiate terms," he said, and nothing could be read from his tone, but she didn't think he was terribly pleased with her. "What do you want? Credits? Another ship?" His lips twitched, but there wasn't much humor in the expression. "The Merry Widow's crew is still cursing your name, if you wondered."

            "You can have the ship back," Jyn said, sharper than she would have liked, because she didn't actually want to be reminded that there had been consequences to her flight from Yavin for people other than her. "We hid it in the desert." It would have been smarter to sell it for scrap, and Jyn didn't look too closely at why she hadn't, why, when Bodhi had said _they might want it back someday_ she had just nodded in agreement. "I'll take you there tomorrow."

            "What _do_ you want?"

            Now she could read something in his voice: sharp, suspicious, maybe a little angry, the first anger he had shown her since she had found him at Tana's table. It didn't matter. It didn't. She would have liked to mend things with Cassian, but in the end, they both had things they valued more than each other's esteem. For him, it was the Rebellion. For her—.

            "Aid for Jedha," Jyn said, more sure now than she had been when she had first asked for him to negotiate terms. "Aid from the Rebellion. There are as many rebels in the holy city as there are on any other planet or moon in the galaxy, and you've left them to languish here for too long with no one to look to for help other than Saw Gerrera." Saw was many things, and like the Rebellion, Jyn found many of those things admirable – his courage, his conviction. But he cared about defeating the Empire sometimes too much, or he cared about helping the people of Jedha too little.

            She looked at Cassian, and didn't look away when she found him already looking back, the anger gone now in favor of quiet attention. Jyn shifted in her seat and reached out to trace the uneven edge of the table with her fingers. "Food. Medical supplies." She didn't know what Jedha needed, and for a moment she wished for Baze, for Chirrut, for the leaders in the local rebellion that she had just started to know, even for Tana, because this place had offered her shelter and purpose but it wasn't _hers_ , and there were people better suited to speak for it. There were better people, but there were few people positioned as she was, with the contacts to reach out to the Alliance and the leverage to negotiate with them on something like equal footing, and that would have to make her good enough, at least until she had time to speak to someone who might know what would serve the Jedha best.

            He was still looking at her, and she shrugged, not an apology but an acknowledgement that, from where he was sitting, she might sound unreasonable. "I know there isn't much to spare, but there must be something you can do."

            "I'm not sure there is," Cassian admitted. "No one foresaw you trying to negotiate on behalf of an entire moon." He snorted. "I don't think I'm authorized for that."

            "Better get to work, then," Jyn said, and she thought she saw the brief flash of a smile before it disappeared.

            She had been expecting him to object, so she was surprised when he stood. When he saw the look on her face, he smiled again, allowed it to linger this time, and it was barely a smile but it was better than his anger had been, or maybe worse, because his anger hadn't made her chest ache. "Better get to work," he repeated back to her. "You have a transceiver?"

            "Bodhi's room," Jyn said, jerking her head toward the appropriate door.

            "It's secure?"

            "As we can make it."

            She listened to his voice in the other room, too low for her to make out individual words, and tracked the time it took him to return on the chronometer over the kitchen sink. She didn't sit idle, because she couldn't, clearing Cassian's mostly untouched cup from the table and then picking up the blaster someone had left on the edge of the counter to clean. When Cassian reemerged, he lifted his hands, and Jyn favored him with a quick smile of acknowledgement before putting the blaster down, shoving it across the counter with her fingertips until it was theoretically out of reach.

            "What did they say?"

            "You haven't won any friends," Cassian said, "but I don't think you were trying to. They've agreed to your terms, assuming that you keep your supply requests reasonable." He studied her, and she wondered what he saw, and what he was trying to find. "Does that satisfy you?"

            "I'm more surprised that it doesn't offend _you_ ," Jyn said, with another scant smile. "No scolding? No reminders that I should keep the big picture in mind, rather than made demands for some tiny moon of no tactical importance?"

            "You'll hear them," Cassian said, "but not from me." Something in his face, the quiet way that the corners of his mouth pulled down and his eyes went distant, made Jyn remember that Cassian wasn't like her, that he had come from somewhere, that he had once called some world _home_ , perhaps one as small and of as of little importance as Jedha, the kind of place that might slide through the cracks of the Rebellion for long enough that there was no longer anyone left there to rebel. The moment passed, and when Cassian picked up the datapad from the table and offered it to her again, she took it.

 

            Bodhi had been alarmed to find Cassian sitting at their table. He'd skirted around the edge of the kitchen until he could close himself up in the bedroom he had claimed as his own. Chirrut had paused briefly when passing and made the kind of vague, considering noise that somehow always convinced people that he knew more about them than he ought to, before continuing on his way. Baze had been the only one to linger, coming to loom at Jyn's side and squint at the datapad in her hands over her shoulder before bringing the considerable weight of his gaze to rest on Cassian. Jyn watched as Cassian went tense across the table, and she remembered things buried under a year of familiarity: how large Baze was and how well-armed, how he wore his anger quieter than either her or Saw but wore it all the same.

            _The obvious threat_ , Jyn had thought the first time she had seen him, and it was still true, no matter how unlikely he was to be a threat to _her._

            "You want him here?" Baze asked.

            "I do," Jyn said, and she turned her attention back to the datapad. She heard Baze's faint noise of acknowledgement. She didn't look to see what Cassian's reaction might be.

 

            Jyn had intended to use the next day to show Cassian where she and Bodhi had hidden their stolen ship, but she found her plans stymied not more than three feet from her front door. A group of children had been playing a game, something Jyn couldn't begin to parse involving rocks and lines scratched into the dirt of the street, and most of them ignored her but one of the older ones, a girl of about twelve, broke away to run up to Jyn, her thin braids flying behind her.

            She stopped in front of Jyn abruptly enough that her little heels sent up a puff of dust, which seemed to please her. "Rolim came by early," she said, with the sing-song care of a child who took her assigned duty as messenger seriously. "He said he didn't want to wake the house, but he said to tell you."

            "Tell me what?" Jyn asked, feigning the patience she didn't feel. She wasn't—she wasn't good with children, although she'd muddled her way through with the ones who haunted Tana's house. She supposed it made sense. She had been the only child she'd ever known, up until she had left Eadu, and her childhood had been irregular even by the standards of Jedha.

            The irritated look the girl gave her seemed to say _I was getting to that_. "Tell you to stay close to home."

            Jyn didn't ask why Rolim – the big man who had lead the raid on the supply yard – would have wanted her told to avoid the streets today. Jedha's homegrown rebels trusted the bonds of family, friendship, faith, and shared history more than Jyn, with her spy's wariness still intact even if she was no longer a spy, was really comfortable with, but even they wouldn't have trusted a child with those kinds of specifics. Either there was a reason Rolim wanted to know where to find her or, more likely, there was some danger he wanted her to avoid. She'd hear the specifics, sooner or later. Instead of asking, she fished a credit chip out of her pocket and offered it to the girl. "Do me a favor? Run to the market and pick me up enough provisions to last four," no, that was wrong, "five people through a couple of rotations. Fresh if you can get it, but nutrition paste or ration packets if you can't. Caf beans, too." Bodhi had forgotten, or he had taken it into his room with him when he had decided to bypass the kitchen in favor of avoiding Cassian the night before. Either way, she wasn't sure when he was planning to emerge long enough for her to ask him.

            The girl tested the chip against the nail on her thumb and then the edge of one of one of her teeth, and the narrow-eyed suspicion on her face, like the most seasoned and leather-faced of the gamblers Jyn had met at the tables over the years when they picked through their winnings at the end of the night, was almost enough to make Jyn smile. Only once the credit chip had disappeared into the pocket of the girl's skirt did Jyn offer the credits she would need to make the purchases Jyn had asked for.

            After the girl disappeared around the corner, Jyn turned and caught Cassian's sleeve at the elbow, giving it just enough of a tug to turn him around.

            "Not today?" he asked, and she liked that he asked only that and went willingly back through the door of the house without waiting for an answer, like how she judged a situation still held enough weight for him not to argue.

            "Not today," Jyn said.

            She spent the day around the house, splitting her time between the datapad she was slowly filling with information for the Rebellion and the more mundane tasks required to make a long-abandoned house livable. She pretended that she couldn't hear the corners of the conversation going on in the kitchen, as Bodhi had apparently decided that there was only so long that he could avoid Cassian while they were under the same roof.

            "We had to go. You weren't—you weren't there. You didn't see it. I made the right decision," were the first words out of his mouth, confrontational and defensive in equal measure, the way he always got when he felt like he was in the right and likely to be blamed anyway. "Neither of us made any promises to the Alliance."

            "It doesn't matter," Cassian said. "It's done now."

            "I made the right decision," Bodhi repeated.

            "Maybe you did," Cassian said, and Jyn couldn't tell if that was agreement or just an attempt to avoid an argument, but whichever was true it seemed to appease Bodhi, and their voices dropped low enough that she could no longer make out what was being said. They were still sitting there hours later when Baze came through the front door, his expression grim and Chirrut hot on his heels.

            "They're sweeping the houses up the street," Chirrut explained. "We don't have much time."

            Bodhi was already on his feet, and Baze was standing by the staircase leading to the second floor, pounding his fist against slats until he found the right one, the one that popped open with a click and the soft whoosh of stale air rushing outwards.

            " _Just_ the houses up the street?" Jyn asked, voice sharp.

            Chirrut shook his head. "All through the city. Your little nocturnal adventure at the supply depot, we think, unless someone else has done something to anger the Empire since."

            "Even odds on Saw, if someone has," Jyn said, and Baze grunted his agreement. Bodhi ducked into the hidden place beneath the stairs, pulling Cassian with him, and Baze gestured for Jyn to follow them. She had barely managed to squirm through when Baze clambered in behind her, his armor grating against the edges of the narrow opening. He pulled the hatch closed behind them, cutting off the light and muffling the sounds from outside, although Jyn could still just make out the scrape of Chirrut's footsteps as he stepped away from their hiding spot.

            The compartment beneath their stairs was not as spacious as the one beneath Tana's floorboards, nor as clean as the one tucked behind the false back of a closet in Jyn's employer's house, where she had once spent a boring but surprisingly comfortable hour when swinging by to pick up her week's pay had turned into hiding from yet another round of searches. When Jyn found her nose resting against the back of Baze's armor, she scooted blindly back, trying to give herself room to breathe and him the legroom to maneuver if it turned out that Chirrut was unable to dissuade their Imperial visitors. That was, after all, why he had positioned himself near the front, and she wondered how Baze had most recently offended the Empire, that he was worried enough about the troopers recognizing his face for him to be in here with the known traitors and the Rebel spy rather than out there, stubbornly standing guard over a man who needed so much less guarding than Jyn had initially assumed.

            Her hip slid over the tips of Bodhi's boots right as the first knock rattled at the front door. There was really no mistaking a Stormtrooper's knock for anything else, even if Jyn hadn't been able to make out the distant, mechanical whine of voices filtered through helmets.

            A hand brushed her the side of her shirt before settling more solidly over her ribs, tugging her back, steadying her, stilling her. It might have been Bodhi, but Jyn didn't think so; she knew what Bodhi's breathing sounded like in the dark, knew where he was, his knees now knocking against her own in the cramped quarters beneath the staircase.

            "Of course you can come in," Chirrut said brightly. "Nothing to _see_ here." He was overselling it. He always oversold it, bright as a spark and too enamored of his own cleverness by half. Jyn spent most of her time finding him almost as funny as he found himself and the rest making horrified eye contact with Baze and silently trying to telegraph _please find a way to silence him before he gets us killed_. (She was almost certain that the way Baze lowered his eyebrows and glowered in response could be directly translated as _if there was a way, I would have found it years ago_.)

            Cassian gave her waist a squeeze, reassurance or a warning or both, before withdrawing his hand, and Jyn pretended that the throb of her pulse in her wrists was all adrenaline, all a response to the men standing outside their hidden place and nothing to do with the one at her back.

 

            When the Stormtroopers were gone and they had extricated themselves from beneath the stairs, Jyn made her excuses and went up to bed, accepting the quick squeeze Chirrut gave her hand as she passed with her usual clumsy fumbling, less because the affection was unwelcome and more because she didn't know how to accept it with anything like grace.

            Perhaps she should have been surprised when Bodhi followed her up, but she wasn't. She made no comment when he pulled the door closed behind him, and when he didn't immediately speak she busied herself with preparing for bed. He'd talk when he was ready to talk.

            "When Cassian leaves," he said, "I'm going with him."

            This also wasn't surprising. Jyn brushed away the reflexive pang of sadness and the worry that followed swift on its heels (couldn't lose him, couldn't lose anyone else, except she could and probably would, and the best example Galen had ever given her for what love looked like was that he had let her choose, had trusted her to know her own limits and the risks she was taking, had watched her run into danger without ever once prioritizing his fear over her need to _do_ something).

            "Yeah," Jyn said, and she reached out to catch his hand as she passed, as clumsy as she had been with Chirrut downstairs, even if she was now offering something like affection rather than receiving it. "I know." She let go of his hand before she could embarrass them both, and busied herself with the fastenings on her boots.

            By some unspoken agreement, they both bunked down in her room, her on the thin mat that she had scavenged from Tana's house and him with the better portion of her blankets to keep his bones from pressing too hard against the floor. "We'll still see each other," he said, anxiety bleeding into his voice and the silhouette of his shoulders a foot away from her in the dark.

            It sounded like an apology. If he had actually offered one, Jyn could have told him that it wasn't necessary, told him that and meant it. Bodhi had given her so many of the things she had needed, when she had needed them: the first face she had ever trusted that wasn't bound to her by blood, two escapes, shoulders to share the weight of Galen's memory, his mother's home and a year of his life. The least she could give him – the _very_ least – was whatever absolution he craved and the reassurance that he was leaving nothing behind that couldn't bear to be left.

            "We will," she said, and she reached out again, tugging at the edge of his blanket until he snaked an arm out from beneath it and caught her hand. It was easier this time; caring was always easier for her when it had an edge of desperation, when she knew that she was running against the chronometer and losing, and she didn't try too hard to figure out what that might say about her.

            (The last words of love her father had spoken had sounded like _goodbye_ ; she was sure she'd heard the same words from her mother, couldn't imagine Lyra had gone eight years without saying them, but she didn't remember what the shape of her mother's mouth had been when she had said them, what her voice had sounded like. Time healed, but it robbed too.)

            "I mean, it's not like I'm going anywhere," she said, and she forced her voice steady. "I'll still be here when you get tired of being a hotshot rebel and decide it's time to visit home."

            His thumb tapped out a vague rhythm against her knuckles. "I never wanted to come home," he said eventually.

            Jyn wished that she had the spine to spit out the _thank you_ that burned silently across her tongue, but in the end there would always be things that she wasn't quite brave enough to say, even in the dark. Jedha in the past year had not been to Bodhi what it had been to her; for her, Jedha had been a place to stand when every step had felt unsteady, but for him it was history, and memory, not all of which was kind.

            (It was still home.)

            "No," Jyn said, "but I'll try to keep it standing in case you ever do."

 

            Jyn ended up with Rolim at her kitchen table the next morning, a cup of chav tea in front of him to match the caf she cradled in her hands. "Gerrera's people hit a fuel transport in the early hours yesterday morning. Between that and our raid, I guess the bucket-heads felt like some kind of response was needed." The set of his mouth was hard, and Jyn wondered if it had been Saw or the Imperials who had provoked his anger.

            "Casualties?"

            "None when the transport blew, although there's an innkeeper and her husband who are going to have trouble making ends meet for a while. Took out the whole front of their building. The Force favored them: they sleep in the back."

            "Do you want me to try to talk to him?"

            He offered her a thin smile. "Begging your pardon, but I don't see how your talking has done much good so far, and I don't see Saw sending any of his Partisans into town to help build frames for the pourstone and carry away debris."

            "And the Imperials?"

            There was the anger. "Four dead. Not sure what set them off about the others, but we lost Jerra."

            It took Jyn a moment to put a face to the name: the woman in the caf shop, the one who had been so eager to add her own notes to the map once Jyn had altered it. She'd been worse with a blaster than Jyn was, but she had a good eye for gauging where a guard's field of vision was or spotting the nearest escape route. "I'm sorry," she said, and hated herself for asking the next obvious question. "Nothing in her house that would have compromised you or the others?"

            From the look on his face, Rolim didn't like hearing the question any more than she had liked asking it. "No. Not everyone is so cautious, but she always was. She had a piece of kyber, just a little chunk her family kept after her grandfather left the temple. I know where she hid it, and it's gone now. Her death might not've had anything to do with us at all. Could've just been some Imp in a snit because no one handed it over when they first went door-to-door, demanding whatever people had stashed." He shook his head. "Just a tiny little piece, no bigger than my thumbnail."

            "Seems to me like an awfully small thing to die over," Jyn said, suddenly aware of the warmth of her mother's necklace against the skin of her chest.

            "Yes," Rolim said, "well. Her grandfather was a Guardian at the temple. And you're not Jedhan."

            Jyn tipped her head in acknowledgement, and Rolim lifted one big hand to rub at the back of his neck. "There will be retaliation from Gerrera over this." He snorted. "I'd probably be with him on that, but when Gerrera retaliates against the Empire, it's not him that their fist comes down on after."

            "You'll let me know if there's anything I can do?"

            "To retaliate?" Rolim asked, with another scant smile.

            "Or to build frames for pourstone and carry away debris," Jyn said with a shrug. "You tell me what's needed. Which reminds me—."

            Rolim was still smiling a little when she showed him out the door. If Cassian wanted specifics about what Jedha needed then she would give them to him, although she wouldn't pretend that the length of the list would please him.

            She collected Cassian from Bodhi's clutches as soon as Rolim was out the door, and led him down the streets until they reached the place where the markets and the Holy Quarter met, where the wares being pedaled took on a very different theme: the holy symbols of dozens of different faiths that Jyn couldn't begin to identify woven into brightly colored cloth or cast in cheap metal, talismans and sticky-sweet incense, one particularly daring vendor who claimed to sell kyber. (He didn't; they were bits of Jedha's red sand melted down into glass, and they looked it, greenish and fragile-sharp. Only the most credulous of the pilgrims shopped at his booth.)

            "Who's that with you, Jyn?" someone asked as she passed, and Jyn picked out one of Saw's people, a bundle at her feet and her long legs stretched into the street from the stoop she was using as a seat. In the city for supplies, no doubt; most of what Saw had, he smuggled in himself, but sometimes there was a gap between when a thing was needed and when it arrived. Or perhaps that wasn't it at all. Perhaps she was testing the mood of the city, of its Imperial occupiers, and looking for an opportunity for the kind of retaliation that had worried Rolim.

            "My business," she said, and flashed a smile to soften the sting, because being _too_ cagey would send the woman more swiftly to Saw's ear than even an honest answer about Cassian's identity would have. "And none of yours, Yarro."

            Magva Yarro rolled her eyes and kicked a rock at Jyn's feet, but plenty of people in NiJedha had secrets, and the news that Jyn was keeping one more of her own wasn't enough to rouse anyone's curiosity.

            "Friend of yours?" Cassian asked, once they had passed.

            "I've made so many friends in the past year," Jyn said, her voice as dry as the desert air, because Saw's people were many things, and _friend_ might even be one of them on a good day, but not all days were good. "It's hard to keep track."

            They were nearly to the closest of the city's gates, and the accompanying checkpoint, when Jyn spotted what she was looking for. Gavra Ubrento stood there, bracketed by two speeders that looked like a good wind would blow them to pieces, but Jyn knew they would run like they were new. Anything that Gavra couldn't fix wasn't worth fixing, or at least that was what Bodhi had been saying since he had met her, six months earlier.

            "These are loaners," Gavra said in lieu of a greeting, waving the carbon chisel in her hand in Jyn's general direction. "I want them _back_. And you're going to pay me."

            "I'm no thief," Jyn said, just so that she could hear Cassian's disbelieving snort from behind her, as she'd known she would. "And Bodhi will pay you." When she got close enough, she dropped her voice, until it was pitched for Gavra's ears only. "He'll be at Tana's house most of the day, and gone tomorrow, if you want to say yours goodbyes."

            Gavra flicked her a glance. "See if I do you any more favors," she said, "if all you bring me is bad news." Still, she stepped away from the speeder bikes, and within moments she was gone.

            "Let's go," Jyn said.

 

            There was sand piled two feet high around the base of the Merry Widow, and the wind storms that kicked up every so often had scoured off the better part of the Twi'lek woman painted on the hull, although her ferocious eyebrows still remained prominently visible. Jyn helped Cassian dig out the ramp far enough for him to get into the ship, and then sat down on the ground outside as Cassian investigated within, trying to keep the tops of her boots at an angle where she wouldn't end up carrying half the desert home with her.

            "A year on Jedha hasn't done her any favors," Cassian said as he settled beside Jyn, a rag smeared with engine grease still bunched up between his hands, "but she'll hold."

            "You're sure?"

            "Worried?"

            "Of course," Jyn said, and she offered him a lazy half smile. "You're taking Bodhi with you."

            He looked back at her more seriously than she thought the comment warranted. "You're angry about that," he said, and it sounded more like a guess than a question.

            "Not about that," Jyn said. How could she be angry that he was giving Bodhi what he wanted? "I might change my mind if the ship blows up five minutes after leaving orbit, though."

            Cassian was still watching her, although the way the corner of his mouth twitched told her that the joke had, if not quite hit, then at least scraped past him before disappearing into the distance. "About your father, then," he said, and Jyn could feel her shoulders knot, the last of her good humor fading away.

            She didn't want to talk about Galen, but she supposed that if anyone  had a right to ask, it was Cassian. "I'm always angry about him," she said, after a pause long enough she couldn't even pretend Cassian wouldn't have noticed it. She thought about adding _I'm always angry_ , because that was true too, and had been for almost as long as she could remember. She was past second-guessing it, past worrying about the way anger felt like a warm, loving hand wrapped around her bones, because it was ugly but it was hers, had kept her on her feet and moving during times when otherwise she might have just given up and stopped. She thought Cassian probably knew that about her, had probably known since she had chased him down on Alderaan, or had come to understand it when she had spent months spitting fury at him on Kafrene. _I always thought you liked the fight_ , he had told her. Maybe someday she'd be less angry, if she lived long enough to see a someday where the Imperial flag didn't reign across the galaxy, but for now she'd hold her anger close and call it good.

            She thought he might understand it better even than that. Cassian was like Baze: he wore his anger quieter than she did – kept it hidden beneath his masks, rarely let it slip its leash, used it more purposefully than she did hers – but he wore it all the same.

            "I'm always angry about him," she said, "but not with you. You did what you could. You tried." And he had lost people in trying; Jyn hadn't forgotten that, hadn't forgotten that Melshi and the others had been personally chosen by Cassian, had worked beside him, had been trusted to whatever extent he trusted anyone, had perhaps even been friends.

            Cassian breathed in, long and slow and deep enough that she wondered if he'd been holding it. She wondered why her answer had mattered, although she didn't doubt that it had. "Did you look for me?" she asked, and she couldn't have said why she did, except that it seemed he was in a mood for honesty and she had wanted to know since she had first seen him sitting in Tana's kitchen.

            "No," he said. Jyn turned her gaze toward the horizon so that she wouldn't have to look at him. It was an answer, at least. That it wasn't the one she had wanted wasn't Cassian's fault, any more than Galen's death had been.

            "I didn't think you wanted to be looked for," Cassian said, voice stripped so flat that the absence of tone was almost as conspicuous as whatever it was replacing would have been. "I would have found you, and I didn't think you wanted to be found."

            Jyn held herself very still. She allowed her memory of the last few days to realign to accommodate this new information. She thought about the way he had said _I didn't want to come here_ like it was an attempt to gain pardon for coming rather than a pin to drive beneath her skin and make her flinch, the way he hadn't looked at her when he had first arrived, the way he had waited to ask about Galen, like she had hesitated over asking whether he had wanted to find her, as though that was the question that mattered enough for him to need to find the nerve to speak it. She wondered if the memory still seemed true if she read guilt instead of anger in his actions—or maybe not _guilt_ , maybe just the reasonable caution of a careful man, approaching someone that he knew could hurt him without knowing yet if they intended to do so.

            She wondered if she could hurt him. She didn't want to, wouldn't, but she wanted to know if she could, because that would mean that maybe she hadn't broken everything by walking away. Cassian had always been a _maybe_. Perhaps he still was.

            So few people had thought first about what Jyn wanted, about whether it was kinder to just let her go. She reached out and took the rag out of his hands, twisted it between her fingers. She thought she might want to take his hand instead, drag her thumb along the fine lines there until she'd learned them all. "I'm not used to people caring what I want."

            "What _do_ you want, Jyn?"

            Jyn finally looked at him, and found him looking back, the serious curve of his mouth softer than what she was used to. "I'll let you know," she said, and then, "We should get back."

            They flashed their forged identichips at the checkpoint. The sun was barely touching the city's wall, the golden light of it bleeding around the edges of the Dome of Deliverance and casting long shadows across the streets. Those same streets were emptying quickly; the Imperials had imposed a curfew in the wake of the previous night's searches, because they knew as well as the Jedhans did that death on Jedha didn't always go unanswered.

            She and Cassian were silent as they made the long trek through the city. They didn't touch, other than the occasional brush of their hands when one of them stepped too close to the other, but there was something rushing through Jyn's veins, something like the burst of adrenaline before a fight but better, none of the fear or the fury that came with firing blasters but all of the bright, near-giddy excitement of a victory close at hand when victory had been anything but assured.

            She thought she might know what she wanted.

            The house was dark and quiet when they reached it. Bodhi was spending the night at Tana's, but when Cassian took a step toward his empty room, Jyn shook her head and reached out to catch his hand. She ran her thumb over his index finger, found a bump that had probably once been a break and noted it, learned it like she had wanted to out in the desert. For a moment, Cassian just looked at her, eyes pinpricks of light in the mostly dark entryway. The door slid closed behind Jyn, and when she started toward the stairs, hand still linked with his, he followed.

            She could hear Chirrut's laughter from behind the door of the room he and Baze shared, but the click of her own door sliding shut muffled it, or maybe she was just no longer listening, her free hand rising to catch on the edge of Cassian's coat, pull him in until she could feel the heat and the weight of him against her hips, her thighs, the curve of her belly.

            He kissed more desperate than she remembered, mouth hard and insistent against hers—but then again, she hadn't kissed him since before Scarif, since before they had almost died and everything that had come after, and she was feeling a little desperate herself. Jyn leaned into the kiss, bit at his lip just to hear the sound he would make (not quite a gasp, shorter, bitten off, too used to keeping secrets for even a moment like this to be entirely unguarded), and felt some quieter answer spark to life beneath her skin.

            She let go of his hand so that she could slide both of hers under his coat, find the edges of his shoulders and his arms with her fingertips and press, learn this too, the shape of him and the way that body-warmed synthcloth slid over skin and muscle.

            He didn't touch her, not at first, other than the press of his mouth against hers and the way he curved his body down to accommodate the room she hadn't left between them. When he did reach out to touch, it was hands cupped against her face, fingers splayed so that she could feel them resting cool and achingly gentle against her cheekbones, the corners of her closed eyes, the hollows behind her jaw. His skin still smelled like the dust and desert and a little bit like engine grease, and she curled her fingers into the fabric of his shirt to draw him in closer (or maybe just to pull herself closer, to find some way to make that possible even with nothing other than clothes left between them, too impatient, too used to hurtling herself forward for even a moment like this one to be entirely unhurried).

            Cassian refused to be rushed, thumbs brushing against her jaw, her throat, the palm of one of his hand slipping down to rest briefly against her chest and cover her mother's kyber crystal or the furious pounding of her heart or both. When she shoved at his coat he shrugged to help her, and then his hands were on her again, drifting down her spine, finding the edge of her shirt and then the edge of her ribs, testing, teasing—perhaps an intentional tease, or perhaps just the understandable hesitation that came on the heels of a year of separation. By the time his hands found her hips, squeezed, dragged her in as tight and perfect as she had wanted (or almost) her breath felt ragged and sharp against the back of her throat, and her stomach felt hollowed out and hungry.

            They made it to the bed, eventually. Sometime after that, Cassian murmured "What do you want?" in a way that seemed frankly unnecessary when his mouth was against her thigh.

            She still didn't know how to answer. She'd never been good at finding the words, and she still wasn't now, perhaps especially now, with the weight of his hands against the backs of her knees and his words spoken directly into her skin. She just knew that she _wanted_ , and that for once wanting seemed like a good enough reason to _have_.

            "Mostly I just want you to hurry it along," she grumbled, but she tugged at his shoulders until he slid up her body, skin against skin and close enough that she could feel the shudder of the laugh he kept caught in his chest. Jyn could barely see him in the last of the thin twilight making its way through her windows, but she found the edge of his jaw with her fingers and rubbed her thumb across his cheek, soft and tender in a way that made her distantly hopeful that he wouldn't remember her doing it come morning.

            She couldn't find the words to say what she wanted, or rather, she knew that if she tried they would come out clumsy with her discomfort at speaking them. She showed him instead.

 

            "I have to go," Cassian said, after morning had lightened the sky outside Jyn's window but not much after. He pressed a kiss between her shoulder blades, and Jyn pushed back the urge to twitch, to turn prickly and sharp like she always did when she felt backed into a corner. She'd had enough regrets about Cassian. If they were going their separate ways, she could be kind about it. She could figure out a way to be kind.

            "I'll be back," he said, and it wasn't the sort of promise that could be allowed to mean anything in the middle of a war, but it still mattered. It was enough.

 

            "They named a squadron after us," Bodhi said, almost a month after his departure, the first time he'd been able to find a line secure enough to contact her since leaving. The picture was spotty, and the edges of his words fuzzed with static, but she could hear the amusement mixed with the resignation in his voice.

            "Us?"

            _"Rogue,"_ he said, still with the weary air of a man delivering the punchline to a joke at his own expense, and it took Jyn a few seconds to remember the improvised call sign that Bodhi had created during their escape from Yavin.

            "No," Jyn said.

            "Yes." Bodhi sighed. "Apparently, when you're marked down on the rosters as a friendly and then you go and steal a ship, they _remember_. Everyone remembers, and once they stop panicking that you've defected _again_ and will reveal their secret base to the enemy, they think it's really funny to make sure that _you_ remember. Forever."

            Jyn wondered if this was why Cassian had told his superiors how much information she still held, how useful she could be, how unlikely it was that she would return to the Empire, if their sudden interest in her had been an accidental byproduct of his attempts to clear her name and prove that her sudden departure was no kind of threat. "I'm sorry," she told Bodhi. "Maybe they'll get tired of it."

             Bodhi snorted. "Unlikely." He shrugged, and she could just make out his smile. "Don't worry about it. They remember Scarif, too."

 

            There were six people in Jyn's basement. No, make that seven: one man had flattened himself behind the table when she had opened the door. Everyone else seemed frozen, with the exception of a woman old enough that her skin looked papery thin, tiny even swaddled head to foot in the brilliant red worn by the Disciples of the Whills. She met Jyn's eyes and lifted her chin, as dignified as a queen sitting in judgment.

            Jyn closed the door.

            "There are people in our basement," she said, when she joined Baze and Chirrut in the kitchen. The kitchen had become as much of a communal space as the one in Tana's home was, albeit for a community of three rather than forty.

            "Ask _him_ ," Baze said, which was not actually any guarantee that Baze hadn't been involved. Even if Chirrut had set off whatever unlikely chain of events had ended with seven people in Jyn's basement, Baze hadn't been far behind. He never was.

            "There might be," Chirrut said. "But does it matter, if there are no people in our basement tomorrow?"

            There were rumors that the Imperials' frequent searches of the Anomids who had joined the Disciples, with their draped robes and face-concealing ventilator masks, had finally born bloody fruit. Jyn hadn't given the rumors much credit, certain that not even the compassion of a true believer would lead someone to foolishly hide a fugitive where they _knew_ the Empire would look. Whatever the truth might be, even the human membership of the Disciples of the Whills had been receiving closer scrutiny from the garrison in recent days, and that kind of scrutiny never ended well for the scrutinized.

            "Not really," Jyn said. "But if there were, hypothetically, seven people who you intended to smuggle off world tomorrow in our basement, they might be more comfortable up here, where it's warm. On that note, I'm going to sleep in late tomorrow. I doubt that anything would wake me. Even seven people sneaking out through the trap door I don't know about under the stairs." Bodhi had been the one to find it, technically: their house backed up against Jedha's walls, and some past occupant had taken full advantage of that, either to avoid Imperial checkpoints or to smuggle contraband in or out during the years before the Empire had arrived.

            Chirrut smiled.

            It wasn't the last time. Sometimes, Jyn heard noises from below that couldn't be explained away as the complaints of an aging house. She didn't stick her nose into it, she just made sure that they started storing their emergency ration bars down there instead of in the pantry ("They'll keep longer in the cold, right?") and made a great show of chucking the more worn of the blankets (and a few that weren't worn at all, raided from Bodhi's empty room) down the stairs, grumbling (loudly) about how they should just throw them out.

            Sometimes, rebellion on Jedha meant knowing when to keep quiet and look the other way.

 

            Rebellion on Jedha meant a lot of different things for Jyn.

            A young man came into the gambling house late in Jyn's shift one night, a pack of teenage boys on his heels. He was dressed in robes not unlike Chirrut's, and she might have mistaken him for a member of the same order – she'd see them, sometimes, the few who were left, lurking around the edges of Jedha, making what life they could and making trouble for the Empire in the same breath – but he was too young. Perhaps he'd been an initiate when the temple had fallen, or perhaps he was just emulating the once-Guardians; he wouldn't be the only Jedhan who remembered those who had defended the temple so faithfully for so many years as heroes, no matter what the Empire said to the contrary. He cornered her by the bar on her break, shoved a piece of flimsi into her hand, and said, "These tanks. You know how they work. Someone told me."

            There were three major local dialects, and Jyn was embarrassingly terrible with all of them. Still, a drawing of the exterior of an Occupier tank was the sort of thing that crossed language barriers, and she had cobbled together enough basic understanding to know what she was being asked, no matter how much of a clumsy, halting muddle her answer might be.

            Her father's team hadn't designed the tanks, but the design for a newer Occupier model had passed through their laboratory nonetheless. The Empire was short on trust. It liked to check the work of the independent contractors that still produced some of its more basic tools of war, to make sure that no enterprising engineer with a grudge decided that the chance to waste billions of Imperial credits in the production of a useless machine was worth his life.

            (The irony had not been lost on Galen.)

            "I don't know how it works," Jyn said haltingly, but she reached under the bar to grope for a stylus. "I can show you what its insides look like, though." Behind the young man, one of the teenagers perked up. Jyn thought she recognized him, had perhaps seen him hanging around the edges of Gavra's little crew of roving mercenary mechanics. Good.

            By the time they left, the boys were chattering excitedly, shoving at each other and laughing like this was play instead of war. They didn't ask Jyn to help, and she didn't offer. She heard a little about the aftermath: tanks suddenly left vulnerable to attack by the Partisans or one of the other local resistance groups when their heat venting systems got gummed up and left them dead in the street, kyber shipments delayed until the officer in charge of the local garrison's hair took on a distinctly pulled-upon look, because someone had gone and dug holes that the tanks' treads couldn't handle in the middle of the street. Eventually the Imperials wised up and switched to a model that used repulsorlifts instead, but rebellions were built on this: (hope, grand deeds), momentum, small irritations, little victories.

            Cassian snorted when Jyn told him, his body spread out long and warm across her sleep mat, the crates of bacta and food and weapons that were the Rebellion's first payment of the debt they owed Jyn stacked between the mat and the door to her room. "A tank was my first victim," he said, fingers curled into the fine hairs behind Jyn's ear in a way that she tried not to examine too closely. "I was eight. Small hands. Turns out that if you shove enough rocks into delicate gears, eventually they just grind down or come apart."

            Jyn had spent half her life collecting information, tucking it away in the back of her head until it could prove useful, so she also didn't examine why she stored this knowledge away for later, even thought she couldn't imagine any circumstance in which knowing that Cassian had demolished a tank as a child might be of tactical value.

            She took some of the bacta patches out to the catacombs the next day, and ended up in a screaming fight about where they had come from, and about how such gifts always (always, always, always) came with a price other than that which had been agreed upon. She left, but she left Saw with the bacta. Foolish, when medical supplies were always scarce on Jedha and Saw might very well decide to scatter the bacta patches in the desert out of spite, but she had ended their argument by telling him he could choke on them, along with his pride, and taking the supplies with her would have undermined her point.

            The only person in the antechamber outside the room that served as some combination of personal quarters and impromptu war room for Saw was the young bomb-maker, the one Jyn had sent to join the Partisans over a year earlier.

            "You need to keep your voice down," he said. He didn't look up from whatever he was working on when he said it, some delicate configuration of gears and wires that could have been an explosive or a toy meant to entertain the children who congregated at Tana's house. Jyn couldn't tell the difference. Nothing the rebels built looked very much like the elegant designs of Jyn's childhood, although they seemed to get the job done.

            "Didn't mean to disturb you," Jyn said, and she hated that she sounded sullen about it but not enough to alter her tone.

            "That's not what I meant," he said. "The people here follow Saw because he's strong. They trust him to do what needs to be done. When you march in here and start shrieking like a rock phantom, you undercut his authority."

            Jyn had wondered more than once what she would have been if Saw had been the one to carry her away from Lah'mu. Perhaps that woman, the one who hadn't been raised in the middle of a conspiracy meant to topple an Empire, would have dug in her heels and refused to bend, the same way that Saw never seemed to give or bend—or perhaps she would have learned compromise and tactics in some other, equally unforgiving landscape.

            She didn't stop yelling at Saw, but she started taking him out into the desert to do it. Sometimes they didn't yell at all, her temper cut off at the knees by the way she had to shorten her stride to accommodate him while also not making it obvious what she was doing – and this seemed equally important, although she couldn't have said why, because Saw knew that he was sick, knew the pieces of him that were missing or metal better than she ever could. It didn't matter. He had his pride, and he would walk until he wheezed if she goaded him into it. That much, she could understand, even on the days when she felt like it was the only thing about him she understood: she had her pride, too.

            She didn't stop yelling at Saw, and it wasn't entirely selfless, but it wasn't just for her, either. Whatever his reasons, Saw thought she was a friend. He trusted her, as much as he trusted anyone, which wasn't very much at all, but it was better than him trusting no one, a possibility that became more and more plausible as each month passed and his paranoia about the people around him only grew. She thought that what little trust she had earned might hinge on her willingness to yell at him, the way that she wasn't afraid of him like someone contemplating betraying a dangerous man might be. (She was, sometimes. He had a temper to match hers and fewer limits on what he was willing to do to secure a victory, but Jyn had never learned to be afraid without her fear making her angry.) As long as she was a thorn in Saw's side, he didn't worry about her being a knife in his back. (Or he knew that the knife would come from the front, in the middle of a row, when he would be looking for it, and found comfort in that.)

            He kept the bacta. Perhaps he did know how to bend, a little, or perhaps he was just too practical to let good fighters bleed out for his pride.

            "This isn't how you win a war," Jyn said, the morning after his Cavern Angels took down an incoming Imperial supply freighter. He'd lost Magva Yarro and one of his few operational X-wings. The Empire had lost its freighter. Tana Rook had lost a friend, a schoolmate she'd known since childhood, when what was left of Yarro's ship had come raining down on the street below. Tana wasn't the only one who had lost someone; Jyn had heard of three civilians dead, and two more who weren't expected to live through the day.

            It wasn't the first time Jyn had said those words since meeting Saw, and she knew it wouldn't be the last. She was sure Saw would count this as a victory. She was sure that he'd find some way to fire back at her, and for once she wasn't in the mood for a fight.

            "If you ever figure out a better way," Saw said, "let me know." He sounded tired, more tired than Jyn felt after a full night of helping Rolim assess the damages and lending a hand where she could, and he'd had the ventilator at his mouth more often than not this morning. She didn't know what to do with that. She was used to Saw being certain, to worrying that she would burn herself on whatever spark kept him alight.

            "If I do, I will," she said, and she hadn't meant it as a joke but he almost smiled anyway.

            Later that night, she managed to get a solid connection with Bodhi. His hair was longer now, almost as long as it had been when she'd first met him, and there were circles under his eyes, but he looked healthier than he had on Jedha, lit up from inside, like a little bit of Saw's spark had found its way into his bones and settled into something warmer and softer than either she or Saw could ever manage.

            "I met him," he said, once they'd caught each other up and she'd answered half a dozen questions about half a dozen different people on Jedha that he worried about, and he'd answered one about the only two sentient creatures other than him in the Rebellion who Jyn thought were worth a damn. "The pilot. The one who took out the Death Star."

            Cassian had not been forthcoming when Jyn had asked, in a way that had made Jyn wonder whether he just didn't care or whether he was being intentionally evasive. "Nice enough," he had said, and then, with the kind of wry smile that made her think that he recognized the Rebellion's shortcomings better than she ever would, in spite of his dedication, he had added, "They gave him a medal for it." That was good to know, but it hadn't told her anything about him as a person, whether he shared Cassian's dedication or Bodhi's determination, whether he had been brave or just lucky, if he was remarkable in some way or just—like them. Just a person, someone who had decided to do something and somehow, against the odds, managed to succeed. She couldn't have said why it mattered. It just did. She wanted to know something about the man who had been the final piece of her father's vengeance. She wanted to know who had taken the ashes of Eadu and reshaped them into something that was, maybe, worth all that had been lost.

            "What's he like?" Jyn asked.

            "Shorter than I would have expected," Bodhi said, and he laughed at the look she gave him. "Don't glare at me, I don't know what to say. Maybe I'll introduce you someday, and you can form your own opinion."

            (She did, later, much later. She liked Luke, but she thought that she would have liked him better had she met him earlier, still young and careless enough for Cassian to describe him as _nice enough_ and for Bodhi to have nothing to say beyond _shorter than I would have expected_. By the time she met Luke, these were not the kinds of things that anyone said about him. A boy who took a lucky shot could be joked about; a man who ended an Empire was a heavier subject.)

            "Maybe I will," Jyn said. "Meet anyone else interesting?"

            "There's this pilot with Green Squadron," Bodhi said, "reminds me a bit of the girls back home." This, Jyn had learned, could mean any number of things – she might be stubborn and kind like Tana, or no-nonsense and clever and acquisitive like Gavra, she might good at telling stories or capable of holding her drink, she might be all or none of those things, and the descriptor told Jyn nothing, because all it really meant was that the pilot with Green Squadron was female and had some combination of traits that Bodhi viewed positively, and therefore she reminded him of Jedha's women. "She's been taking me out on her A-wing. Thinks I might still make a decent fighter pilot, if I can get enough flight hours under my belt not to choke when someone starts shooting." He shrugged. "If not, well, the Rebellion always needs mechanics, and pilots to make cargo runs." He didn't seem bothered by the idea of making cargo runs for the rest of the war, doing for the Rebellion what he had once done for the Empire, but Jyn supposed that it was difficult to feel like cargo runs weren't enough to make things right after he had helped to take down the Death Star.

            Rebellion on Jedha meant a lot of different things for Jyn. When she was mentioned as a footnote in the history texts, they would write about Scarif, about how the collaborator's daughter and numerous co-conspirators (names unknown) had stolen the plans and delivered to the Rebellion its first major victory, the shattering of a star. Rebellion on Jedha would barely be a footnote – just one more moon pushing back against the Empire's rule in whatever ways it could – and Jyn would not be mentioned at all. Rebellion on Jedha was lying in her room first thing in the morning and listening for the scrape of a trap door from below. It was midnight raids with Rolim's people, until the Empire broke up his group, scattered and shattered them like they did with all of Jedha's homegrown rebel cells (it was hearing the news about how Rolim had set off one of the incendiary devices he had been stockpiling from the shipments Jyn received rather than risk being captured and questioned, how he had taken with him every Stormtrooper who had come to apprehend him), and then it was joining raids and funneling supplies to the next group to rise in their place. It was being an extra blaster when Saw's people wanted her, and when she wanted them. It was connecting information to people, people to people, causes to causes – it was little things, and nothing that she could delude herself into thinking could _only_ be done by her, and sometimes that was better, to know that the mission or the fight would not be lost if she was lost.

            Bodhi did cargo runs and swore at ships until they worked the way he wanted them to. Cassian did what he had always done: the small, thankless tasks of espionage and infiltration, with no one but himself and a droid to count on. Jyn built connections, built momentum, did what she could for _people_ , and hoped every day that it would be enough. On the good days, she thought it might be.


	10. Chapter 10

            Bodhi's teeth were bloody. He was also grinning at Jyn and, even with the flicker of static that always came with a poor connection on his end, the combination was unnerving. "I wanted to let you know I was alive," he said, which was not any less unnerving. "People are always telling you things, and I thought that they might tell you I was dead."

            "That's—" Jyn said, and then she had to stop, because she really had no idea what she was supposed to say in response to _that_ , especially since he looked so proud of himself for thinking of it.

            "There was an assault on our base," someone said, and Jyn had noticed the woman standing behind Bodhi, but she hadn't paid her much mind, distracted by Bodhi's bloody teeth and the alarming things he was saying. "Rook piloted one of the transports we used to evacuate the ground crews. Did a good job of it, too," she added, almost as an afterthought, and Bodhi briefly turned his red-stained smile on her. "Mostly."

            "The flying was fine," Bodhi said to Jyn, "it was the landing that did me."

            "Lucky shot took out his stabilizers," the woman said, "anyone would have fumbled the landing, and most of us would have taken casualties. He just ended up with his face in the control panel."

            A head injury would explain all the smiling, Jyn supposed.

            "Green Squadron?" Jyn guessed, and the woman's mouth turned up a little at the corner.

            "Talked about me, has he?" She reached out and ruffled Bodhi's hair a little, although Jyn thought that the way her fingers lingered might have had more to do with wanting to check for lumps and blood beneath the singular knot that had become Bodhi's hair at some point during the escape. "Shara Bey. Now, if that's all taken care of, I think I'll get him down to the infirmary. Like I should have done an _hour_ ago, Rook."

            "M'good."

            "You're concussed," Shara said, "and letting you pass out in front of your friend would be a poor thanks for getting my husband off that ice ball. Nice to meet you, Erso." When Jyn started, she shrugged. "He's talked about you, too. Mind, _a lot_ of people talk about you. Sometimes I learn new words, listening to them talk."

            Jyn could guess. "How many different ways _are_ there to say 'ship thief'?"

            "Sixteen, if you're talking to a Weequay." Shara smiled, brief and weary, before she nudged Bodhi. "Say goodbye."

            For a moment, Bodhi looked like he might protest. Then he shifted in his chair, and whatever spinning the room must have been doing seemed to decide him. "Goodbye," he said to Jyn, and she saw Shara's hand grow large in the screen a second before it went dark.

            "Goodbye," Jyn murmured to the empty room. She was glad that Bodhi was still in one piece. She was glad that there were people willing to look after him when he needed it, if he needed it. She was glad, and she didn't dwell on the question she hadn't gotten the chance to ask.

            She got her answer three days later, when the next shipment from the Rebellion arrived. It had probably already been on its way when their base had been attacked. Blasters, this time, few of them in working order but all of them with enough of their original parts still intact that someone with clever hands could make them work again. The spindly black figure unloading the crates at the designated meet spot out in the desert was familiar, and Jyn thought that she might be able to pick him out of a crowd of nearly identical enforcer droids now, although she couldn't have said what the difference was, if it was a scratch on his plating that gave him away or something about the way he held himself.

            "Jyn Erso," he said, and he dropped one crate on top of another hard enough to make Jyn wince. "I am here to deliver the goods you requisitioned." He paused. "Cassian said I had to."

            "He's okay?"

            He fixed his photoreceptors on her and was silent long enough that she was certain – although not as certain as she would have liked – that the silence was meant to make her squirm, rather than being the precursor to bad news. "He is in good health," K-2SO said, eventually. "We were nowhere near Hoth. Other side of the galaxy, in fact. He's been in deep cover for the past month. He wouldn't even let me go with him. _Apparently_ I'm too conspicuous." He sounded irritated, which Jyn couldn't fault, even if he was—sort of inarguably conspicuous.

            She popped open one of the crates and pulled out a blaster. When she pointed it at the sand and fired, the shot came out spluttering, and veered sharply to the right. Well, that would have to be fixed. "This one's fussy," she said. "Maybe I'll name it after you."

            "Depends," Kay said. "Will the name prove to be at all fitting? I am highly effective. Have you gotten any better at hitting the things you shoot at?"

            She pointed the blaster at him. "We could find out," she said, but she was smiling.

            It was weeks before she saw Cassian again. He brought no supplies, no news, no excuse for arriving on Jedha other than that being where Jyn was. He let her crowd him up against the front door, let her kiss him until heat replaced some of the nervous, jittery energy of having spent days not knowing after Hoth and weeks not knowing after Kay had arrived on Jedha. He let her push back his coat, his shirt, find new bruises and bumps with her fingertips, let her try to be gentle even though she knew—she was aware that she wasn't very good at it.

            Later, curled up within the familiar four walls of her room, she traced the fresh, bright red streak of half-healed skin over his ribs. The skin around the edges felt hot, but not so hot that she worried about infection. A glancing blow from a blaster, probably, not serious enough for him to justify the use of a bacta patch, and it was silly to be bothered by it when she knew for a fact that Cassian had gotten worse in the past. "How long can you stay?"

            His eyes were half closed, lazy and content in a way that she still wasn't used to seeing him. "A couple days. Maybe a week."

            "New mission?" she asked, and he nodded.

            She still didn't want the Alliance. She still wanted Jedha. But things had gotten more complex when she wasn't looking. She wanted Cassian, too, wanted him alive and in one piece—and Jedha could spare her for a while, once in a while. Had always been able to spare her, if she was honest. "Want some company?" she asked.

 

            The rebellion on Jedha was changing. Jyn watched it change, watched as more people who called NiJedha home quietly made their way out to the catacombs that housed Saw's rebels, watched as the pushback from the Imperials became more vicious with every successful attack, every fugitive that escaped from under their noses. The local resistance movements got angrier, more likely to take risks and less likely to shy away from a fight with their better armed, better trained occupiers. Those that wouldn't or couldn't fight went out of their way to cause other kinds of trouble, even if that only meant making sure that the Imperials who patronized their restaurant got the dregs of the beer or meat that had started to go off, so smothered in spices that the person eating it wouldn't know until they spent the rest of the night crouched in the 'fresher. The basement got crowded enough for Jyn to give up entirely on the ruse of not knowing what Chirrut and Baze spent their spare time doing; they drew the curtains and made sure that people knew about the hatch at the back of the stairs, and in its own way Jyn's house became as busy with life as Tana's had always been. She watched as more civilians got caught in the crossfire, and then she watched one day as Tana strapped her emergency blaster to her hip and twitched the bright red of her shawl to cover it for a trip to the market, and she wondered if there really were any civilians left on Jedha.

            Almost three years earlier, another young woman had looked dead in the eye of the man who would give the command to destroy everything that she had ever called home, and warned him that to tighten his grip was to feel everything he wished to hold slip between his fingers. She was right. This was the Empire's mistake. This was always the Empire's mistake: with Jyn, with star systems, even with Jedha, a little moon valuable only for the crystals that grew on its surface and the symbolic weight of its history. The things you held too tightly learned to hate you. The people who hated you learned to push past fear and fight back. They _rebelled_.

            (Jyn met Leia only once before the end of the war. She brought in a shipment of the supplies that were the Rebellions' side of the bargain Jyn had struck with Cassian. She was hollow-eyed with exhaustion and the white of her tunic was rumpled from the long journey; Jyn didn't even realize that she was talking to a princess, a leader in the resistance, until much later, when Cassian asked her how it had felt to have a royal escort for her cargo.

            They hadn't spoken much. Jyn had offered her half a nutrition bar, and the princess had declined before abruptly changing her mind. She had eaten in quick, mechanical bites, and Jyn was familiar enough with the act of eating because she'd realized how long it had been since her last meal rather than eating because she felt hunger to recognize it in someone else.

            "I understand there's an Alderaanian among Saw Gerrera's Partisans," Leia said. "I hear that you have Gerrera's ear." Idly, Jyn wondered who this woman had befriended to learn that little tidbit of information. Bodhi seemed the most likely culprit, although Jyn supposed that one of the strays she had sent to the Rebellion might have passed along some rumor they had heard, or Cassian might have felt compelled to include it in a report to command. "Could you arrange a meeting?"

            "Why?" Jyn asked.

            She watched the woman's expression go shuttered, and waited for the lie, so it was a surprise when the answer, while hardly illuminating, sounded so much like truth: "It's important. To me. Can you?"

            The Partisans' base was no safe spot for a woman of the Rebellion. Saw held grudges, and it seemed sometimes like every passing day made him more twitchy, more paranoid, more likely to turn a blaster on a friend instead of keeping it pointed at the enemy, where it belonged. "If you get yourself shot, I'm not taking the blame." Something about the woman's bearing, the way that even tired she held herself like she was one wrong word away from a fight – as familiar as the short work she had made of her half of the nutrition bar had been – made Jyn add, a smirk already tilting her lips, "But I'm not taking the credit, either."

            Leia startled, and then she smiled, reluctantly, like it had been dragged out of her.

            Jyn didn't hear much about how the meeting she arranged went, although she did wonder what had been said when she heard that Euwood Gor, the man who had once spat every time that Jyn passed him, had left the Partisans to rejoin the Alliance's Pathfinders. She didn't wonder as much once she heard who Leia was.

            She was glad, a little, that she hadn't known. She thought that the conversation might have gone differently with the weight of Alderaan hanging over them both.)

            The rebellion on Jedha was changing, which was why, when Jyn came back from one of half a dozen missions with Cassian to find no one at the checkpoint to show her identification to, she felt nothing but the first stirrings of dread.

            The streets were not quite empty, but they were emptier than they should have been at this time of day. Most of the booths in the marketplace had pulled down their awnings or the metal grates that kept out would-be thieves at night. The vegetable merchant Tana had chatted with during Jyn's first excursion into Jedha was just locking up. When he saw them, he reached for the blaster he had set on his table.

            No—not when he saw them. When he saw _Kay_. There was not a single Stormtrooper on the streets, not a single Imperial droid. For once, the KX-series droid at Cassian's back had no way of blending in, here in the middle of occupied, _hostile_ territory.

            Only, it didn't appear to be occupied anymore.

            She waved her hand at the vegetable seller. He knew her face well enough by now that his fingers fell away from the blaster, but he kept his eyes on them as they passed.

            "We could just ask him what's going on," Kay said. "He seemed friendly."

            Jyn got her explanation within seconds of walking through the door to her house. "The Imperials pulled out late yesterday," Baze said.

            "Trade ships have been told that they have until midnight to leave Jedha," Chirrut added, with a calm that Jyn was certain she wouldn't have been able to replicate.

            The Stormtroopers were gone, but the Destroyer was still squatting over the city. Imperial personnel had all been evacuated. The Empire never gave up the things that it had claimed, or at least never left those things intact when it did. Suddenly, the deserted streets Jyn had passed through made more sense.

            Jyn had heard whispers all while she was growing up: planets that had pushed back too hard against the Empire, or had become inconvenient in some other way, were dealt with. Perhaps the worst thing about the Death Star was that the Empire had never truly needed it. They had already possessed the technology necessary to wipe a settlement or a city off to the map, to leave nothing of the place or the people that had angered them except ashes and molten rock. If Jedha was lucky, it might be a few days of bombardment, a lesson for both Jedha and the nearest systems about what happened to those who refused to submit. Some of the city's population might survive, once the Imperials felt certain that any opposition had been stamped out. If they weren't lucky—.

            "They're going to raze the city," Cassian said, giving voice to the worst of Jyn's fears. No one in the room disagreed.

 

            "You should go," Jyn said to Cassian later that night, across the table and the remains of the dinner she had eaten only because it would be stupid to starve herself before a fight (as if this was a fight, as if any of them would be given the _chance_ to fight). "The Rebellion will need to be told what's happened here." Communications had been down since the Empire had left Jedha; even Bodhi's heavily modified transceiver wasn't working. It was as good an excuse for sending him away as any.

            Baze flicked a glance in her direction, but then he returned his attention to Chirrut, continuing whatever quiet conversation they had been having as though Jyn hadn't spoken at all, giving her the illusion of privacy. She wondered if he was trying to convince Chirrut that _he_ should leave. If so, she wished Baze luck, although she didn't think he'd have any.

            Cassian tipped his head, acknowledging her point. Jyn felt some of the tightness in her shoulders and in her chest relax.

            "No," he said.

            Jyn looked at him. "No?"

            "No." He didn't explain, just met her eyes across the table, like he thought she could figure out his reasoning on her own if he gave her enough time to get there. Maybe she could.

            "Speak for yourself," K-2 said. "I, personally, have no desire to meet my end in a fiery inferno." When Jyn looked at him, one brow raised, he added, with an air that implied that she never should have doubted him, " _I_ think we should _all_ leave."

            "All of us?" Jyn asked. "There are eleven million people on this moon. Fifty thousand of them live in NiJedha. I'm interested to hear your plan for evacuating them _all_."

            "All has a variable meaning," K-2 said, and he was undoubtedly displeased with her, because he loved Cassian, or came as close to it as a droid could, and it—it had been made clear that Cassian's continued presence on Jedha was dependant on hers. Maybe he was even right, but Jyn didn't have the heart to think of that tonight. Morning would be soon enough.

            It wasn't. Word came to their door early the next day: a group of pilgrims had tried leaving the moon's surface just after dawn, a few scant hours after the deadline given to the trade ships in Jedha's port. The scavengers had found the shredded remains of the pilgrims' vessel outside of the holy city's walls. No one was leaving Jedha.

 

            For the first time in years, there was no Destroyer hovering over Jedha City. Jyn made a quick trip to the roof after dark, taking the macrobinoculars she'd found in Cassian's pack with her, and confirmed what one of the neighbors had told her: the Destroyer was still there. _All_ of the Imperial ships previously assigned to Jedha were still there, floating in the moon's orbit, out of sight to the naked eye but not gone.

            A week passed, then two, and nothing changed. Jyn made daily trips to the roof, sometimes with Baze or Cassian. Communications were still down. The few ships that didn't take what had happened to the pilgrims as the warning it was clearly intended to be were found in the same condition: twisted wrecks in the desert, with no signs of life aboard and little that was worth salvaging.

            No ships left Jedha. No ships arrived on Jedha, either. Soon, it became clear that razing the city had never been the Empire's plan at all.

            Baze was the one to finally say it, one night when he and Jyn stood on the roof and passed the binoculars back and forth, as though what could be seen through them would change. "Not a blitz, then," he said. "A blockade."

 

            Weeks stretched into a month, and then two. The food available for purchase stretched too, until it didn't, until the tables in the marketplace were bare and most of Jedha's restaurants were shuttered and dark. Not much grew on Jedha. The further flung settlements were all small enough that they had never needed to rely on trade to for food, but the holy city had long since grown past the point where it could sustain itself on the plants that grew wild at the base of the plateau or the few native animals that roamed the desert, the kitchen gardens on rooftops or in the narrow space between buildings, planted with things that wouldn't wither in the dry air or wilt in the cold.

            The Empire wouldn't destroy Jedha, not when there was an alternative. It would starve Jedha instead. Jedha, its history, the weight the place held for a hundred different faiths spread across the galaxy—those things made Jedha City and its continued subjugation symbolically important, if occasionally politically inconvenient. Its people were nothing _but_ inconvenient, and the Empire would hardly mourn over thinning their numbers through hunger, especially if hunger made them more malleable.

            "I've started rationing the children," Tana said one night, regretful but unyielding, like she expected Jyn to argue. Jyn didn't, not about that. Tana's cheeks were thinner than they had been when the blockade had started, thinner than they had been years ago when Jyn had first arrived, even if there had never quite been enough to go around even then. She wondered how strictly Tana had been rationing herself, and for how long. If Jyn was a betting woman – and she was – she would have bet that Tana had started skimping on meals the moment she had realized that no new shipments of food and goods would be arriving on Jedha's surface.

            Jyn went home and pulled crates out of the basement – nutrition paste, ration bars, the last of the strange imported root vegetables that she had bought in the market on a whim that none of them had ever really been able to figure out how to cook. Not everything, but most of it. Kay watched her as she worked, his head tilted like a bird that had found something interesting to watch. "You could help me," she said.

            "But I don't want to," Kay said, which was about what she had been expecting. She shook her head, and returned to the basement.

            "Don't argue with me," she told Chirrut, when he came to listen to her sweat her way through moving the last of the food up the stairs.

            "Did you think I was going to?" he asked, sharper than he usually was when he spoke to her, but hunger and worry had sharpened all of their tempers. Jyn dropped the final crate with the rest, and reached out to thump his shoulder in apology. Chirrut nodded his acknowledgement, which she took to mean forgiveness; years with Baze had made him accustomed to rough apologies, the kind that didn't require words or the concession of an argument.

            "Leave two or three crates with me," he said. "I'll make sure they get where they need to go."

            Jyn hesitated, but of course Tana wasn't the only one in the city who took in lost and hungry mouths, and Jyn had already learned her lesson about the potential cost of safeguarding only that which she loved – with Alderaan, with the Death Star, with months (years) of dithering over when she would reveal the existence of her father's weapon and its flaw, dithering which had ultimately proven pointless. Worse than pointless. She wouldn't ever really know how much worse, if anything would have changed or if something else might have been salvaged or saved had she spoken up sooner, had she been able to take that step back from Galen's safety as her primary concern. She didn't regret prioritizing her father, or at least she didn't think she would have known how to do anything else, but she could admit now that it had been a mistake, maybe even a costly mistake. She wouldn't make the same one twice. "Good," she said.

            She borrowed a speeder from one of the neighbors and took two of the crates to Tana's house. Any more would draw attention, and while supplies were not yet scarce enough for people to have started looting their neighbors, Jyn didn't doubt that it would get there, eventually, if nothing changed.

            Something was going to have to change.

            She found Cassian standing out front when she returned, his elbows resting on the low wall that surrounded the front of the house. His gaze was fixed on something up above, and at first Jyn was sure that he was watching one of the surveillance droids the Imperials had deployed after the extraction of the garrison. There were hundreds of them, buzzing above the city like fat metallic flies, watching, undoubtedly feeding information back to the Destroyer and her crew. Jyn wondered what they were looking for. Ships making a break for orbit, perhaps, so that the Imperials could give them the same welcome they had given every other ship that had tried to leave Jedha. Perhaps they were just looking for signs that Jedha's population was sufficiently beaten down and broken. Jyn wondered if the droids had captured any images of her. They undoubtedly had. She wondered if she had been recognized as a fugitive yet, if, when Jedha was forced to welcome back its conquerors, hers would be one of the first doors they came to.

            She heard a shout from above, and realized that it wasn't the droid that had caught Cassian's attention. There was a boy and a girl on the roof of the house across the way. As Jyn watched, the girl lifted her arm and threw something at the surveillance droid hovering overhead – a rock, perhaps, or maybe a bottle. She missed, but the boy cheered anyway, and then he made his own attempt, his improvised missile clattering harmlessly onto a neighboring rooftop. "They do know," Jyn said, and she sounded so much calmer than she felt, her heartbeat already kicking at the base of her throat, "that those things can shoot back, right? And that their aim is a lot better. And that they _explode_ if you actually take one down." She'd seen it once, soon after the surveillance droids had arrived: one of them had passed too close to an open window, and a man had swatted it out of the air with a vibromop. It had laid in the street for a few seconds, rolling around in the dirt and trying to get airborne again, but once it had become clear that the droid was too damaged to fly it had self-destructed and taken a speeder and the doors and windows of the nearest building with it.

            "If they're anything like me at that age, they don't care," Cassian muttered, but he already had a leg half over the wall when the second rock that the girl threw hit the droid. Jyn's breath caught, and she braced her hands against the wall to follow Cassian, but she already knew that if the droid came down there wasn't much either of them could do, other than shout a warning and hope that the kids had the sense to heed it.

            The droid listed to the side, and the children cheered again. It wobbled, and then lurched up a few feet in the air. The blaster attached to the round body swiveled, seeking out a target, but the rock had clearly damaged something essential inside of it, and after a moment of uselessly seeking out a target it spun and listed unsteadily upwards again. This time, it didn't stop, not until it disappeared into the inky darkness of the sky. Damaged, then, but not so badly damaged that it would self-destruct rather than returning to the Imperial ships for repair.

            Jyn let go of the breath she had been holding and settled on top of the wall. Cassian fell back a step until he could lean next to her, and he looked a little bit breathless himself. Neither of them spoke, until Jyn said, "I need to go see Saw."

            He didn't argue, although Jyn thought he probably wanted to. From what she had been able to gather, the Alliance didn't like or trust Saw any more than Saw liked or trusted them. They almost seemed to resent him for becoming someone too infamous to be useful. Cassian's personal opinion seemed more mixed, perhaps because his own hands were not nearly as spotless as the Rebellion's reputation was, but he still didn't trust Saw, which was—reasonable, really.

            (She wondered, sometimes, what would happen to men like Cassian Andor if the war ended—men like Melshi and Sefla, people like the ones who had volunteered to fly a doomed mission to rescue her father. _We're a bit of a ragtag bunch_ , Melshi had said, and she wondered how they would be remembered, the ones too unruly for military discipline, the ones who might not clean up as nice as history liked for its heroes. She wondered _if_ they would be remembered, if their sacrifices would be recognized or if they would be allowed to fade into obscurity, or be swept hastily under the rug to rest beside the Rebellion's previous involvement with Saw and every other dark and bloody thing that had been done under the auspices of war but which would prove inconvenient in a time of peace, if such a time ever arrived.)

            "Tomorrow, when it's light," Cassian said, and there was no question to his voice but Jyn knew it for the request it was. She followed him inside. As she passed the top of the stairs leading down into the basement, she scooped a nutrient bar from one of the crates. She broke it in two, offering half to Cassian and ignoring the way her stomach snarled a protest. If he understood why she was rationing them more strictly tonight – if he knew that she had given away the majority of their stockpiled supplies, and he had to, because K-2 wouldn't have remained silent for her sake – he said nothing.

            They were still learning to be kind. She didn't think either of them had much practice, but some nights, nights like this one, when she tucked herself close and warm against Cassian's side, too tired to do anything other than kick off her boots before her head hit the pillow, Jyn thought that they might just be getting the hang of it.

 

            "Jyn!" Her name was a rusty bark on Saw's tongue, and when she looked up, for a moment it was as though neither he nor time had moved since the first moment she had seen him: light glinting off of metal and clinging softer to flesh and cloth, every inch of him a challenge (a warning), twice as large as life and ten times too loud for the living. The whole room stopped when Saw raised his voice, hands pausing abruptly in the act of cleaning a blaster or moving a dejarik piece. The whole world stopped.

            The moment passed. The usual chaos of the militia's improvised base resumed: too many people in too little space, voices bouncing against each other loud enough that Jyn had sometimes wondered how the Empire couldn't hear them even from orbit, how the noise didn't vibrate the bones of Jedha's long dead loose from the walls. Saw was what he always was, which was to say that he was everything he had been in that first moment but also older and more tired, more like her than she would have imagined and more flawed than she would have wished for. He clapped her shoulder once she managed to weave her way through the room to his side, the pressure cuff around his wrist digging into her skin. She didn't mind so much. This conversation would go easier if he was pleased to see her at the start of it.

            "Come, child," he said, and he turned to lead her down the familiar paths that would take them to the rooms set aside for Saw's personal use.

            Her eye caught on a pile of crates shoved deep into a alcove, and Saw made a faint, satisfied noise when he caught her looking. "The Empire would starve us out. They'll have a trickier time of it than they think, eh?"

            Jyn stepped into the room, and saw supply lists drawn on flimsi, hyperspace nav charts, the holographic rendering of a planet that was not Jedha rotating placidly near the window. "Not that tricky," she said, the softest condemnation that she knew how to give. "You're leaving."

            He stopped, and his expression clouded briefly, like he had forgotten that he had left his plans on display here at the heart of his sanctuary, or like he had forgotten that she wasn't the child he half remembered, and that she would be able to draw her own conclusions from the evidence. "Nothing's certain yet," he said, and there was a warning in his voice, as there always was at the start of an argument. Jyn had never once heeded it.

            She wasn't sure what she would have said. Something about how half of the people they had passed in the outer room were Jedhan (they hadn't been, when she had first come here; desperate times made for desperate allies). Something about how he was abandoning them, and possibly something she couldn't take back, something about how he was a _coward_ (he wasn't, and she knew that even as the word flashed across her mind; he just knew the futility of fighting a battle already lost when the war was still in progress). Instead, what came tripping out of her mouth was, "You're _dumping_ me?" sharp and angry and more hurt than she would have liked, too much and much too personal a confession to put into the hands of a man like Saw Gerrera.

            Saw's expression softened incrementally, and she was once again reminded of the way he had looked the first time she had seen him, the way he had looked at _her_ , wistful and half-buried in memory. "I wouldn't have to," he said. "You could come with me. There's more to this war than Jedha. We can find another place to stand and fight."

            Jyn's laugh startled even her, and she shook her head. She thought there might have been a time, young and furious and with nothing to bind her other than Galen, when that offer would have sounded like the best one she was likely to get.

            She had wondered what it would have been like to be raised by Saw. Saw would have taught her to stand and fight. Lyra had taught her to negotiate, and Galen had taught her to compromise but to never actually take _no_ for an answer, even if she smiled and nodded when the word was said, to look at a wall and wonder if there was a way to burrow under it rather than blast through it. "What if there was something else you could do?" she asked. "You told me to come to you if I ever thought of another way to fight a war."

            He'd actually told her to come to him if she thought of another way to _win_ a war, but the distinction had never held much weight with Jyn. The closest she had ever come to winning had been with her standing at the top of a tower and looking her own death in the face. Saw had been right when he had said that she'd never seen a war won. She couldn't imagine what that kind of victory would look like. She kept her victories small.

            It wasn't the kind of thinking that won a war. It might win a few battles, though. It had on Scarif. It had at Yavin, with the help of a nice-enough-but-too-short pilot. She'd take her chances with Jedha, this one and the next one and the next, until she won, or until all the chances were spent.

            She expected Saw to argue. She'd forgotten that he hated backing away from a fight as much as she did. He placed the ventilator to his mouth, took a deep breath, and said, "I'm listening."

            It wasn't much. It was a chance. "Have you ever run a cargo blockade?"

 

            Saw had eleven X-wings secreted away in the depths of the catacombs. Only two of them were operational, and only one of them was operational in a way that included the ability to fly in a straight line. Getting any of them into a state fit to run an Imperial blockade would mean spare parts, and a better than average mechanic.

            The former, Saw had readily available. He had already been planning a departure, and ships' parts cost less on a planet that no one could leave. The latter, Jyn could provide.

            "This is going to cost you _double_ , Erso," Gavra Ubrento said, her wary, narrow gaze fixed on the Tognath mercenary standing closest to her. " _Triple,_ " she snarled, when he pulled the hood over her face. She threw an elbow in the Tognath's direction, even though she had agreed to the hood, to all appearances with no intent other than to be as ornery and difficult as possible whilst still getting paid.

            Jyn could appreciate that.

            When Gavra saw the X-wings, she solemnly offered her professional opinion of what she had to work with: "Stanging trash." Jyn left her in the Tognath's care, pretending not to hear the way he muttered. She couldn't translate the words, but she had spent enough time around Bodhi to know what a pilot sounded like when someone had insulted his ship.

            "Quadruple!" Gavra yelled after her.

            It took two weeks for Gavra to fix Saw's ships. Jyn spent most of those two weeks watching Saw and Cassian circle each other, because it turned out that they were missing one more essential component of their plan: enough capable pilots to fly the ships once they were repaired.

            "I've seen courting couples who dance around the question less," Baze muttered one night, after Tana had briefly forgotten that the kitchen table that Cassian and Saw's most recent emissary were dancing at wasn't hers and ejected them both into the yard with nothing more than a flutter of her shawl, a firm word, and the serene expectation that anyone she was felt needed to be removed would cooperate in their own removal.

            "If you still need a pilot," Jyn told Saw the next time she saw him, "just take Cassian."

            Saw frowned, but he gave in. He didn't trust the Rebellion, but he trusted her. ( _As much as he trusted anyone_ rose silently at the end of the thought, but no, he had trusted her enough to agree to this, and to agree to a half-mad run past the blockade in the first place on her recommendation alone, and that was what trust looked like to people such as they.)

            She didn't much regret asking, or his agreement. Jyn might have preferred that the people she cared about be safe, but Cassian wasn't built in a way that would allow him to sit on the sidelines any more than she was, and Jyn knew better than anyone what a terrible thing it was to make someone's decisions for them and call that care.

            It was another week before the next sandstorm blew up out of the desert and left Saw's people scrambling to take advantage before it blew back out again. It was clear that the Imperials were watching Jedha and the barren stretch of land around it closely, even the places where the surveillance droids weren't, or they would have seen smugglers eager to capitalize on the moon's misfortune long before now. The storm wouldn't be easy on the ships – no amount of mechanical skill and second-hand replacement parts would change the fact that the X-wings were hard used and well past their prime – but it would give them the cover they needed to get well away from whatever attentive eyes were fixed on Jedha.

            Cassian went with them. If this was a holodrama, Jyn would have stood outside, perhaps blown a kiss or at least have waved, watched his ship until it was a speck on the horizon. As it was, those who had spent more years than Jyn weathering Jedha's storms thought that this one might have enough spit and fire to sweep up across the plateau, and Jyn allowed Tana to herd her somewhere with a roof and solid walls. She didn't think it would have mattered whether she was there to see Cassian off or not. She knew herself well enough to know that the idea of a wave or a smile would have crossed her mind, and that she then would have discarded it and stood there with hands in pockets and watched him go. (Perhaps she even would have watched until his ship was a speck on the horizon; she couldn't say.)

            A week passed, but the ships were back before the second had stumbled to a close. They brought with them what little the X-wings' cramped cockpits would store and a cargo shuttle not unlike the one that Bodhi had once flown that someone had seen fit to liberate along the way.

            "It won't be enough," Baze said, his eyes fixed on the open door of the cargo shuttle, where Saw was standing unsteadily and overseeing the delivery of the bounty his rebels had won. It was probably the most popular Saw had been with the people of Jedha City in all the time he had been here, and Jyn thought that Saw was smart enough to know it.

            It wouldn't be enough. The crates of foodstuffs that the pilots had brought back would have stretched far if they had only needed to feed the forty or fifty people crowded in the marketplace (there would be more, many more, once word spread), but it wouldn't do much at all, or for very long, for the five hundred thousand people who called NiJedha home.

            "It'll buy us some time," Jyn said.

            To do what, she didn't know.

 

            The rebels of Jedha – both the Partisans and members of the local resistance – were celebrating their victory, such as it was. The nettle wine had never been imported, and therefore hadn't run dry the way stronger liquors and food had over the past months. Saw's people seemed determined to make the most of that.

            Jyn had meant to join them, but now her cup sat abandoned on top of one of the crates in the shadowed alcove of Saw's base, what had once been a cell for prisoners now repurposed for use as food storage. Cassian had drawn her away soon after the revelry had started, and he alone among the returning pilots had not looked to be in any mood for celebration.

            "A second Death Star," Jyn said, and she couldn't have put a name to what she was feeling in that moment: ripped open but also curiously distant, like bleeding from a wound that she could see but couldn't feel. "I suppose that explains why they were still taking kyber out of Jedha."

            Cassian had contacted the Rebellion once he had been far enough away from whatever the Imperials were using to jam communications out of Jedha. Jyn had known he would. She'd thought that he might be able to bring her word that Bodhi was in one piece. He brought her word of something else instead.

            The Empire was rebuilding the Death Star. That was all he had been told; if the Alliance was planning an attack, they were doing a good job of keeping subspace radio chatter to a minimum. Whoever he had spoken to probably hadn't even been meant to tell Cassian that much.

            "Four years dead," Jyn said, without meaning to say anything, "and they still won't let him rest."

            Any response that Cassian might have made was drowned out by Saw's voice. He'd been speaking for some time, Jyn realized, his words broken only by the occasional scattered cheer from the gathered rebels – Saw knew how to keep his people motivated, how to take the rush of one victory and feed it into the next – but now his voice rose sharply, the occasional quick rasp of the ventilator serving as punctuation rather than a pause, as if he would turn even the damage that years of fighting had done to him into a strength at the end of the day. "—to remember: one fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can take the day."

            Jyn's breath caught, and somewhere between the spark of pain that came from knowing that the worst part of her father's legacy once again floated in the depths of space and the roar of approval that greeted Saw's victory speech, a new idea caught and held.

            One shot. It had only taken one lucky shot to destroy the Death Star the first time.

            Two children on a rooftop, flinging whatever came to their hands at the most visible symbol of Jedha's continued occupation, their voices when one of their improvised weapons finally connected a shrill echo of the shouts of the rebels.

            And Jyn thought: _maybe not a sharp stick, but a rock might do_.

            "Jyn," Cassian said, and she thought that he might be trying to offer her some comfort, now that the noise had quieted down from _deafening_ to merely _loud_. She waved him off.

            "Get Saw," Jyn said. "Get everyone. I think I know how to break the blockade."

 

            Jyn ended up being the one to gather Saw, her hand on his elbow, his militia now far enough in their cups that they didn't mind too much when she absconded with their leader. When they reached Saw's room, Cassian was already waiting, K-2, Baze, and Chirrut with him. Jyn started when someone stepped in behind her and closed the door, and when she turned she was even more surprised to find Tana Rook on her heels. The offer had been made, true, but Jyn hadn't actually thought that Bodhi's mother would find the thought of watching a group of rebel fighters drink to their own triumph enough of a lure to actually allow herself to be swept up in it.

            When Tana caught Jyn looking, she just smiled. "You know I hate to be left out of the gossip," she said, with the air of a woman who was _certainly_ not inviting herself to be a part of an impromptu war council, but didn't think she'd be denied even if she was. She was right; Jyn was of the mind that Tana could invite herself wherever she damn well pleased, and even Saw, who looked less than happy at the number of people Jyn had gathered in his inner sanctum, said nothing.

            Jyn got right to the point. "The surveillance droids retreat to the ship when they're damaged," she said. "What if we sent something back with them?"

            Saw was the first one to get it, the start of a smile curving his lips and erasing his annoyance. "A bomb," he said, and he said it like a man who had never met a piece of the Empire that he didn't want to see burn.

            Jyn nodded, and after that she didn't need to say very much at all. (This was and had been her gift to the Rebellion, and to the rebellion, the best part of herself that she knew how to give: connecting information to people, causes to causes, people to people. She didn't have her father's genius, but Lyra had always said that it was better to be clever than to be a genius, and no one could claim that the people Jyn had found weren't clever.)

            "We've used that tactic before," Cassian said. "Disable an Imperial droid, attach the payload, wipe its memory and send it walking into an enemy base." He looked at K-2 and shrugged an apology. "The spy eyes go off if you get them on the ground, though. We'd never have the time."

            "I'm not suggesting we get them on the ground," Jyn said, and she held up the jagged chunk of rock she had collected from the floor of Saw's base. Cassian had been there the night that the children had damaged the surveillance droid, and she saw his expression turn considering.

            Baze grunted. "Flexi-paste and mud," he said. "It'll stick."

            "That's your answer to everything," Chirrut said, which wasn't untrue. Jyn had once watched Baze replace a window with nothing more that flexi-paste and determination. It held together their kitchen table, and every dish that she had ever broken trying to cook. He used spacer's tape to patch holes in the walls and cracks in his armor. Like the Rebellion, and like the rest of Jedha, Baze was used to making what he had make do.

            "And yours is the Force," Baze said with a shrug. "I like mine better."

            "The surveillance droids move," Chirrut said, for once making the decision to sidestep this old argument with Baze. "But there are always some near the temple." Jyn didn't ask him how he knew, how much close attention he paid to the place he had once been a Guardian of, even now, or how much it cost him to pay close enough attention to know what had become of it.

            "We'll only get once chance at this," Kay said. "And the odds of one of you making the throw are—low. They're very low."

            "Then it's good that we have you," Jyn said. "Isn’t it?"

            The droid looked at her, and he said nothing, but she thought she had surprised him, possibly even in a good way.

            "We'll have to clear the streets," Tana said, as implacable and as pragmatic as ever. "If this works – if you succeed, and the Destroyer comes down – it's coming down on Jedha." Grief flashed briefly across her face, and Jyn remembered that the night Magva Yarro had been shot down in her X-wing, it had not only been Yarro whose life had been lost. "Even if it doesn't, there could be retaliation. People should know that there's danger, and be able to take what precautions they can."

            Jyn looked to Saw, knowing that if someone was going to complain about the risks to their plan if so many people were to know that, at the very least, they were planning _something_ , it would be him. He pressed his lips together, but he nodded. "It hardly matters. Even if someone would betray us," and his tone implied that someone would _always_ be willing to betray them, if the price was right, if they were promised safety in exchange for information, and he wasn't _wrong_ , "the Imperials have cut off communications to the surface."

            "It wouldn't have mattered even if they hadn't," Tana said, as firm in her faith in her neighbors as Chirrut was in his faith in the Force. Maybe she was even right. Tana had faith, but she wasn't naïve. The rebellion had changed on Jedha in the past years. Not everyone was a rebel, but perhaps even those who weren't found themselves less willing to negotiate with a force that had already made it clear that they didn't care if the people negotiating lived or died.

            (This was always the Empire's mistake: to hold a thing too tightly and think that it wouldn't grow to resent you for it, to rule through fear with the expectation that fear would buy obedience rather than anger and desperation.)

            Saw made a faint, disbelieving sound, and he pressed the ventilator to his mouth, but the argument Jyn had been expecting never came. "We have another problem," he said. "To disable the Star Destroyer, we'd need a big blast. Nothing I have can make that. Nothing I have that could come close is small enough to lob at a surveillance droid."

            No one seemed to have an immediate answer. They lapsed into silence, until Cassian finally broke it.

            "When I was tracking kyber shipments," he said, "before we knew what they were being used for," and here he cast a glance at Jyn, and he almost looked like he was struggling not to smile in response to her grimace, "someone told me about a run another rebel cell made at an Imperial freighter that was transporting one of the crystals. They destroyed the freighter, but the blast took out two other freighters and half a dozen TIE fighters. Our best guess was always that the kyber on board was responsible, that it amplified the damage done by the ion canons, or by the blast."

            He was looking at her again. Jyn's father had been the expert in kyber crystals—or at least, the expert in their destructive potential. She was the closest thing to an expert that they had. "That—sounds right," she said.

            "I can get us an ion bomb," Saw said, and Jyn thought of the young sapper she had sent to him, less young than he had been now and seasoned by years of building incendiaries for Saw's militia out of anything that he and they could find.

            Tana let out a sigh, soft and almost sad. "I can ask around," she said, and Jyn could hear her reluctance. "Someone might have kept safe a kyber shard large enough to do what we need it to do." She didn't look as pleased as she had been by their plan before. Neither did Chirrut, his mouth set and the thump of the butt of his staff against the floor something like a reproach. Kyber was sacred on Jedha, and beyond Jedha. People had died to protect it.

            Jyn's hand went to the collar of her shirt, fingers brushing against the necklace her mother had given her. It was warm, not warm like it had absorbed the heat of her skin but warm like a living thing.

            Lyra had been a woman of faith, even if Jyn wasn't. Like Tana, like Chirrut, Lyra had seen something sacred, something holy in the crystals, as her husband never really had, even before the Death Star, when the word _kyber_ had still meant the chance to help rather than the potential for devastating harm. Perhaps if she did this, she was doing a disservice to her mother's memory.

            She slipped the necklace from around her neck and brushed aside maps and battle plans so that she could place it on the table.

             Or perhaps this was the best memorial she could offer her mother: a reckless willingness to do what had to be done to protect the people she loved, even when it cost her.

            Jyn didn't know. But she liked to think that Lyra would have approved. That she would have been proud. "You won't have to."

 

            They waited two days. That was enough time for Saw to get them the rest of what they needed. It was enough time for Tana to spread word to the people she knew, and for them to spread it from there. It was enough time for Chirrut to whisper to the few other remaining Guardians in the city, and for that whisper to trickle down to the pilgrims who hadn't fled when the Imperials had issued their warning. Baze went to the ports, spoke the to the other mercenaries and the captains of ships that were now half-buried by sand and disuse. Jyn returned to her job at the gambling house briefly, just long enough to tell the people who made a living at the tables to keep their heads low for the next few days and to watch them scatter like those who operated just to one side or the other of the law tended to do when there was a threat hanging overhead.

            Two days and two night later, Chirrut led them into the kyber temple. He didn't say a word when Baze stepped automatically to the front of their little group – her, both former Guardians, Cassian and K-2 – and he pressed a finger to his smiling lips to indicate that Jyn should remain silent as well. Baze led them through the temple, his steps sure, never hesitating before selecting a door or turning one way down a branching corridor, as if he had walked this temple every day for the last twenty years, as if he had never left.

            They made their way onto the roof. Jyn raised Cassian's macrobioculars to her face, and pointed silently to the droid hovering overhead. K-2 stepped out to take aim.

            It went wrong immediately.

            For years, Kay's ability to blend in with Imperial forces had been as much of a boon as his inability to convincingly pretend to still be one of them had been a curse—but there were no more Imperial forces on Jedha. The garrison was gone, and they had taken their enforcer droids with them. In her eagerness Jyn had forgotten that a surveillance droid's primary function was to _surveil_ , to look for things that were out of the ordinary. Any enforcer droid still on Jedha was out of the ordinary. Any enforcer droid on Jedha was a potential threat.

            She saw the moment when the surveillance droid's blasters swiveled. She saw the moment when Kay decided that he would take the shot anyway.

            She _moved_.

            In a fair fight, K-2 would use Jyn to mop the ground every time. One of Saw's fighters might have been able to take him, but Jyn didn't have the experience to best a bigger, stronger, faster opponent who had metal and gears instead of skin and blood. It wasn't a fair fight, though; he wasn't expecting her, and when she wrapped her fingers around the cold metal of his arm and used momentum and her own body's weight to drag them both toward the ground he wobbled, off balance, and then he staggered. Not far, but far enough that the first shot of the surveillance droid's blasters missed him.

            Not far, but far enough for his throw to go wild, the bomb with its sticky coating of mud and paste landing somewhere near the center of the roof with a _thunk_ that Jyn could hear but couldn't track in the dark. She turned her head, trying to see where it had landed, before Kay shoved her out of the way of the next blaster bolt.

            She stumbled and went down hard, and K-2 went down beside her, less intent on getting shot now that doing so would fail to win them anything. For a moment Jyn stayed there, breathing in dust and stone. She heard Cassian return fire, and then she heard him swear. "More incoming."

            He fired again, and was answered by the quick, angry buzz of a surveillance droid firing back – more than one surveillance droid, from the sound of it. Then she heard something else.

            "The Force is with me. I am one with the Force."

            "Chirrut!"

            "I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me."

            She rolled onto her side so that she could see the rest of the roof. There wasn't much to see, until a shot from Baze's repeating blaster caught one of the surveillance droids. The resulting explosion lit up the night, lit up the rooftop below, and let Jyn see the man standing at the center of it, his shoulders straight and his staff held between neatly folded hands.

            "I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me." Chirrut stooped, hand groping for the bomb, and Jyn knew he wouldn't find it, that if she couldn't spot where it had fallen in the dark there was no chance of Chirrut finding it _blind_ , and that he was going to die for _nothing_.

            "Chirrut, come back!"

            She thought she could have gone her whole life without knowing what Baze Malbus sounded like when he was afraid.

            Another surveillance droid blew. This time it was Cassian's doing. Chirrut straightened away from the roof. There was something in his hand, and as she watched he tested the weight of it, and then he brought his arm back.

            "I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me."

            _We'll only get once chance at this_ , K-2 had said.

            The bomb sailed through the air. It hit the surveillance droid, mud and flexi-paste splattering across metal, covering the droid's holocam and half of the shell that served as its body.

            It wasn't—possible.

            (It was. Four years earlier, a pilot had trusted the Force and fired blind at the greatest weapon the Empire had ever built. More had been done with less.)

            The droid jerked a few times, like it was trying to shake loose the thing that had been thrown at it. Baze picked his way across the roof slowly, cautiously, ready to shoot the droid down if it looked like its repusorlift would fail, although Jyn doubted even that would save them if the droid activated its self-destruct sequence with the bomb they had built still attached to it. The repulsorlift and whatever other systems powered the droid must have remained intact, however, because Baze had barely reached Chirrut's side when it veered sharply up, and up, away into the night.

            Jyn scrambled for the binoculars, which she had dropped when K-2 had shoved her, barely feeling Cassian's hand on her elbow or the way her bare hands scraped against the rough stone of the rooftop. When she lifted them to her face she found that they had broken in the fall and most of the area over her right eye was dark. That didn't matter. She could still see through the left.

            "The Force willed it," Chirrut said, just a shade too giddy for her to think he hadn't been shaken at all. Baze laughed, just a shade too relieved for the sound to be as derisive as it might otherwise have been, and Chirrut added, "It bothers you because you know it's possible."

            "I know it's possible that you almost got yourself _shot_ ," Baze said pointedly, but Jyn's attention was on the night sky. She couldn't pick out the surveillance droid, but she could see the Destroyer.

            "Anything?" Cassian asked, his voice tense and his hand still resting on her elbow.

            The sky blazed red. It crackled green. "Yes," she said, but she couldn't find the words to say anything else as she watched the Star Destroyer that had shadowed Jedha for years rip itself to pieces.

            It was a small victory. It wouldn't last. But even a small victory was still a victory.

 

            They sheltered in the Temple of the Kyber until the sun peeked over Jedha's walls, although other than a few pieces of the Star Destroyer that hadn't been vaporized by the blast and managed to make it through the atmosphere, there was nothing really to shelter _from_. There had been TIE fighters on the Destroyer, but maybe their pilots hadn't been able to scramble them in time to escape, because none appeared in the sky. When Jyn stepped out of the temple, she found people already on the streets, putting out small fires and assessing the damages. If there was to be retaliation for the destruction of an Imperial warship, it wouldn't be today.

            Or the next day, or the day after that. The tattered remains of the Destroyer hovered in Jedha's orbit for a week, and no other ship came to replace it, to rain yet more fire down on Jedha for their disobedience.

            "It can't be that easy," Cassian said one morning, eyes still groggy with sleep and a mug of caf held loose between his hands.

            (It wasn't. Somewhere, on the other side of the galaxy, an Emperor was dead. Another Death Star had been destroyed. Coruscant was in revolt. The remains of an Empire were slowly eating itself. The war hadn't ended, but it was ending.) 

            The first of the smugglers, opportunists all of them, arrived two days later, with the food and goods that Jedha's people were desperately willing to pay for. Jyn found out about the Empire's defeat in the most unassuming way she possibly could have: one of the smugglers laughed at her and said, "What, you haven't heard?"

            She stood there for a long minute after he told her, unable to make her tongue or her muscles work. He took another look at her face and snorted, although he looked a little more sympathetic now, assuming that the same expression meant the same thing on a Iktotchi's face. "A rebel, huh?" He turned his back on her. "I've got a discount for you, in that case. Tell Han Solo that Marvee says _hello_."

            "We don't actually all know each other," Jyn managed to say, but either she hadn't spoken loudly enough or he didn't care, because he gave her the discount anyway.

            She took the news back to the house, and saw the same stunned disbelief echoed back to her on Cassian's face, and on Baze's. K-2 said only, "We need to find some way to contact the Rebellion," and Chirrut seemed to greet the news more calmly than the rest of them could manage, but even he spent the next few days moving carefully, as they all did, like one wrong step might make it not true.

            Tana sat and listened quietly as Jyn told her, and then she got up and reached with trembling hands for the one of the kitchen cabinets, the one she used to store odds and ends, mostly the junk that inevitably accumulated in a busy home. She reached deep, into the very back, and pulled out a bundle of red fabric, which she then rolled out on the counter. Jyn didn't know what the symbols embroidered into the fabric meant, but she knew that the thing wrapped inside was a kyber crystal, as long as her thumb and twice as wide. She watched silently as Tana picked it up carefully and placed it on the windowsill, where it would catch the last of the fading light. Her hands were steadier now.

            The news reached Saw before Jyn did. He looked down at the table in his war room, at a datapad containing battle plans that now might never be used. He didn't look up when she entered.

            "I didn't," he said, and then he stopped. He reached for the ventilator mask, decided against it, and let his hand fall away, his voice rasping breathlessly when he spoke again. "I didn't think to live to see the end of this war."

            Jyn studied him. She had wondered once what the end of the war, if it came (when it came) would have to offer men like Cassian Andor. It probably had even less to offer a man like Saw Gerrera, who had given so much of his strength to the fight, and had taken so much of his strength from it. Who had done so much, for better or worse.

            She had no easy answers to offer, but she did have a bottle of wine. She put it down on the edge of the table and used the broken off tip of a vibroknife, the end of it wrapped in rags, to pry off the seal. "We'll have to figure out what to do, now that you have," she said.

            Saw almost smiled. "We?"

            She didn't always know how she felt about Saw, but she knew she wasn't going to abandon him. They were too much alike. He was too much what she might have become (for better or worse), had the war stretched on another decade or two. "Always so eager to abandon me," she chided, but she was smiling when she said it.

            The last of the Imperial ships left the next day. Perhaps they had received orders (perhaps they had received many different orders, from different corners of what had once been an Empire), or perhaps they simply tired of waiting over a moon that had never been important enough to hold when other worlds were now also in revolt. It meant that communications opened up again, and that Cassian was finally able to confirm the news that the smugglers and then the more legitimate merchants had brought them. It meant that others were able to do it same.

            It also meant that on the night when Bodhi Rook once again returned home, Jedha was free, and Jedha was celebrating.

 

            "They sent you a medal," Bodhi said, and he placed a small transparisteel box on the table in Jyn's kitchen. His hair was a mess, and his cheeks were flushed. They'd had an interesting time getting through Jedha's packed streets. Someone had handed Bodhi a mug filled with something pungent and undoubtedly very intoxicating the moment he had stepped off the ship, its hull painted with a slightly lopsided Alliance starbird. They'd been two streets away from the house when a large man had lifted Bodhi off his feet, hugged him hard enough that Jyn was sure she'd heard his ribs creak, and then kissed him full on the mouth before setting him down again. Jyn hadn't asked if they'd known each other. No one tried to kiss her, so maybe, or maybe they just knew that Jyn would be less appreciative of having that much of the celebratory mood spill over onto her.

            "And, uh, a commendation," Bodhi added. "For Scarif. Apparently, when Sefla started calling you sergeant, that counted as a field promotion? I don't know how you ended up on the rosters, honestly, because I _really_ don't think that's how a field promotion works, especially if you're, you know, not actually a member of the military. Probably someone lower down the chain of command just thought it was funny." He nudged the box a little closer to her. Jyn took it like she thought it might bite. "Congratulations, Sergeant Erso. I guess."

            "Does that come with a military pension?" Jyn asked as she flipped the box open. The medal was round, and shiny, and would probably look very nice holding up the uneven leg on the table Baze had built.

            "Honestly? Probably not." He smiled at her weakly. "Might come with a job, though, if you want it."

            Outside, she could still hear the revelry, accompanied by the occasional boom of the kind of fireworks that people who had spent the last few years making bombs might conceivably piece together. Bodhi had jumped the first time he had heard one, and he still occasionally started in his seat. He'd always been nervy, but never like this, and she wondered when that had changed. They had a lot to catch up on. Years. They had stories to tell, the kind that couldn't easily be told over a patchy transceiver.

            Odd to think that they might now have the time _to_ tell those stories.

            "We can talk about it tomorrow," Jyn said. She arched a brow at him. "Assuming you plan to stick around that long?"

            Something like guilt flashed across his face, so she still knew him well enough to have guessed that much correctly. "It's not that I don't want to see what Jedha's like without the Empire," he said, "and I know there's a lot to do. It's just—there's a lot to do _everywhere_ , Jyn. And I—." He stopped, took a breath, and shrugged. "Maybe I'm the one to do it. Some of it. Sometimes."

            Bodhi. Still trying to make right. Or maybe just trying to make something. Jyn smiled and stretched out a leg to kick the edge of his chair. "Maybe you are," she said. "Maybe I'll even come watch you do it. Some of it. Sometimes."

            He smiled back at her, surprised and pleased and so transparently both of those things that it made Jyn's chest hurt. She didn't like the feeling, but she wouldn't have traded it for anything. "Yeah," Bodhi said. "I'd like that."

 

            Hours passed, and the noise from outside the house quieted, although not by much. Bodhi eventually left to, according to him, visit his mother and find someone else to kiss, not necessarily in that order. Jyn walked him most of the way to Tana's house, because no matter what he said, she knew him well enough to know that kissing would wait. She kept her fingers tucked deep into the pockets of her vest to keep them from the cold, and her shoulder bumped companionably against his as they walked. When they were a few feet from Tana's door, Bodhi told her to go find someone of her own to kiss, and winked at her so broadly that she worried he might injure himself. She swatted at him half-heartedly, and watched as he darted, laughing, toward Tana's door. She was still smiling a little on the walk home.

            She found Cassian up on the roof. For a moment she just watched him, the long straight line of his spine and the way that his hair glinted with red when another firework burst in the sky above Jedha. He turned his head, not enough to look at her but enough for her to know that he had heard her approach, and lifted his arm. Jyn stepped forward and tucked herself beneath it, warm and close and familiar, and so much of so many things that she hadn't known she'd wanted—or, at the very least, hadn't known she'd be permitted to have.

            She brushed her knuckles against his side, hesitating over the place where she knew the scar from Yung's blaster shot was. So many things she'd come close to not having at all. So many things she'd never thought she'd be able to keep. The list went on, and now that it looked like she might have a chance at having them, she found that she was greedy. If she might be able to have what she wanted, she wanted it all.

            It was strange, still, to contemplate a future that might be determined by _want_ instead of _need_. It was strange to think that she might now have to consider what would make her happy, rather than what would keep her alive.

            It was strange, so strange, to think that they were winning, that they had won, that she'd lived to see it after all.

            "Nice night," Jyn said.

            "It is," Cassian said. "Welcome home." He pressed his lips to her hair, and she could feel the thump of his heartbeat where her side pressed against his, steady and strong. They'd said that they would talk about whatever was between them after Scarif. They never had. There had never really been the time—or, no, that wasn't true. There had been time, but the middle of a war was never really a _good_ time to talk about the future, or to promise anything.

            Tomorrow, perhaps she'd figure out what she wanted, and the right words to use to tell Cassian what that was. Tomorrow she'd figured out whether she would go with Bodhi, or whether she would stay, or whether she would do something else entirely. Tomorrow she would find out what Baze and Chirrut intended to do with the Empire gone. She would start to figure out what kind of life she wanted to build for herself, without the Empire or the Rebellion or the next fight to define where the corners should be.

            Tonight it was enough to know that there would be a tomorrow, and that tomorrow could wait. She could wait to savor her victories, and to count her losses, and to determine what her next steps would be. Tonight she could just take the time to breathe in deep, until the cold, dry air of Jedha burned her lungs. She leaned in closer to Cassian and reached out to swipe his cup, sitting abandoned on the low pourstone railing that closed in the edge of the roof. He made a faint, annoyed sound, but he let her have it, and whatever was in the cup burst bright and sweet across her tongue. The arm around Jyn's shoulders tightened, and she took another long, deep breath.

            She lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, wow, so it's done? It's done.
> 
> Big thanks to everyone who stuck with this story even as it, uhm, became progressively and monstrously longer. I've had a lot of fun chatting with everyone in the comments, and again, I'm on [Tumblr](http://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/) if you want to say hello over there. 
> 
> I never really know what to say in final chapter comments, so I'm just going to say that it's been a real pleasure both writing this and watching other people react to it, as well as getting to explore one of my oldest fandoms in a new way. Drop me a comment or a kudos if you feel like it (they're always much appreciated!), and once again, thank you so much for reading.


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